


what if i was

by MisPronounce_and_MisAccent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Casual Relationships - Freeform, Codependency, Dave Strider Character Study, Developing Friendships, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Friends With Benefits, Game Over Timeline, Gay Dumbassery, Increasingly Complex Metaphors for Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Loneliness, Love Confessions, M/M, Meteorstuck, Mutual Pining, Repression, Sort of? - Freeform, Teen Angst, Touch-Starved, again: sort of, i take a couple liberties, in general like i wish it wasnt but this is game over yall, its unavoidable, the inherent romanticism of Looking, this sounds depressing but its sweet and comedic also i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:16:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27638750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MisPronounce_and_MisAccent/pseuds/MisPronounce_and_MisAccent
Summary: The thing about you and him.The thing is, you're not friends.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 66
Kudos: 171





	1. Chapter 1

It doesn’t start easy. Not kind either.

You look out over the bubble-spotted void — or what’s visible of it, between the scrawled chalk skyline — tense in the silence. You’re not completely alone. The Mayor’s here, as always. But you talked the poor guy's ear off — does he even have ears? — about some bullshit earlier, and now you’re grateful for the quiet.

Really.

There’s clanking somewhere deeper in the meteor, dull metal-on-metal you can only hear when there’s so little else to listen to that it seeps through the silence. You wince. If you’d thought to bring headphones this wouldn’t even be a thing, but your room is down four dark-ass hallways and you feel fucking stuck to this spot, like the energy needed to unfold your legs and walk is something you just ain’t got right now, so you just sit.

And sit.

And, eventually, there are footsteps.

“Have you ever considered mufflers for your shoes, dude?” you call out. Your echoing voice and his even more echoing footsteps have blocked out the resounding metal clanging. “Can’t do any stealth with all that stomping.”

You can finally see him, barging into the room all scowl and muttering and heavy step and everything about him is so fucking loud, and it’s disrupting the quiet. He looks over at you, and you realize only then that you’re shrouded in the shadow of your Empire State CanTower. You lean out into the light.

He grimaces. “Wow! I knew I was the biggest idiot this side of paradox space to think that I’d get a moment of quiet out here, but you must be breaking some record by managing to insult me before I’m even in the fucking _block_. Congratulations!”

“Thanks, man,” you say, grabbing a can from the middle of the Statue of LiberTab (and, fuck, you really gotta get someone else to weigh in on these names) like a low-budget game of Jenga, as he shifts from one foot to the other. “Better make me a medal for that one.”

“‘Asshole of the week’ engraved on it. Your only accomplishment in the seven fucking sweeps you’ve been alive.”

“Hell yeah, dude.” You toss the can to him. He fumbles, then catches it. “I can be quiet. Me and the Mayor just finished rapping about all those new can town updates, you won’t believe the crime statistics, but if you want me to fuck off I can go.” You feel a little less rooted to the spot, now. Less like your legs are concrete and you’re just waiting for some troll girl to saw them off.

“Doesn’t fucking matter,” he says. He sits down next to you, finally, legs tucked up to his chest as he grabs a piece of chalk. “But if you can refrain from giving me another headache, it’d be kindly fucking appreciated.”

“I’ll do my best, man.”

The thing about you and him.

The thing is, you’re not friends.

Thinking the words ‘I don’t like him’ feels mean and unnecessary, but it’s fucking true. He’s just so much. The stomping and the rants, the romance bullshit and the romcoms, like no one ever fucking told him that that’s the kind of shit you’re supposed to tamp down. You know Rose would say something about projection and refusal of the genuine self, but the thing about _that_ is, she isn’t here. The truth of the matter is, if you’re that fucking loud, if you don’t keep your shit in check, people ain’t gonna like you and you’re either gonna be stuck alone or with a bunch of other losers. You got that, and you fucking learned.

Guess it didn’t do you much good though. Here you are, with the only person who will fucking talk to you on this rock, some loudmouthed asshole who never figured out when to tamp it the fuck down.

That’s really the thing. You’re not friends. You’re two kids who have been ditched by everyone else in your lives; left for greener, more smooch-filled pastures, by every other person you could reasonably talk to, and you’re stuck with each other. And you’re not being unfair, it’s a two-way street and he doesn’t like you either. For a bunch of reasons. A lot of them are probably Terezi.

(But that ship has sailed, if by ‘ship’ you mean ‘murderclown’ and by ‘sailed’ you mean ‘stole your girlfriend.’)

Whatever. This keeps happening, showing up in can town together and sitting around, saying complete bullshit or nothing at all, keeping it completely clear and obvious that you don’t like each other, you don’t, you both got fucked over by circumstance and maybe the quiet does suck, just a bit, sometimes, and it ain’t the worst thing to not be alone.

“‘The Statue of LiberTab’...” he reads the sign on the artistic masterpiece that is Lady LiberTab. His voice is rough in a way you’re not even sure human voices can be, like a bit of insect-trill is clinging to the end of every word. You’ve heard it in Terezi’s and Kanaya’s voices, too, but something about his really highlights the grating. “Please tell me the fucking chess pawn came up with that atrocity of a name, and not the — supposedly — fully functioning human.”

“Fully functioning _god_ , dude. Pay some respect.” He glares at you, eyes sunk in their sockets, utter fucking bullshit cause you know he has nothing to do but sleep. His scraggly teeth are visible through the part in his lips. “It’s a great name and until you’ve gotta go naming an entire can city worth of high-art tourist trap replicas, I don’t wanna hear it.”

“What the fuck is this?” he asks, completely ignoring your response in favor of picking up a small structure, the metal shaped into a vaguely rectangular, wonky shape. You have to lean into his space to see what, exactly, the awning — fashioned from paper labels — even says. His uncombed, curly mass of hair brushes your face.

You flinch away, just a bit, and then point at where it very clearly says, in your scrawled red: “‘hot dog stand’, dude, I know you know how to read English.”

He squints, and you’re close enough to see one of his freckles disappear in the crease of his wrinkled nose. “Dog is your word for barkbeast?” He looks up, sharply, and nearly hits his forehead on yours, which is probably a sign you should probably move away. You don’t. “Why is it hot?”

“No, Karkat, it’s like—” You take it to show him the shitty drawing of a hotdog you, an artist thorough in your craft, took the time to include, but he doesn’t move his hand away, so now your hand is on top of his hand and that’s. Fine. “It’s— it’s a food, man. You put it in bread and people sell it in a stand for like a dollar.”

He looks even more concerned, now, and his teeth really are all a jumble in his mouth and his lips are really chapped like dude we can _alchemize_ lip balm, it isn’t that _difficult_ , and— “You cook barkbeasts?”

—and, honestly. You’re not a makeup kind of guy but who the fuck doesn’t at least get some Burt’s Bees? So goddamn chapped. “Didn’t y’all cook literal babies for sauce?”

“That’s not the same kind of ‘grub’.” He rolls his eyes and his head is tilted at the perfect angle to yours, mouth still moving with those chapped-ass lips and scraggly alien teeth and— “There these things called ‘colloquial terms’ in a language, Strider, that if you—” 

You don’t know why you do it.

You don’t know why, or even when you leaned in, but there you are, kissing your not-friend while he’s bitching about inconsequential bullshit. Hand on the side of his face, holding him in place, both of you still in the moment, because he _isn’t doing anything_ , and it’s enough time for your chest to get all tight with panic, but then— 

His nails digging into your arm, his mouth open and teeth sharp; you’re kissing him and he’s kissing you and you don’t know _why_. You don’t. You’re without a goddamn thought, you tell your brain to shut off for one second and just let yourself inhabit your body, feel nothing but lips and clawed hands and those _teeth_ and not a single fucking thought about why.

(You know Rose would ask, and she wouldn’t even wait for you to answer before launching off into homolust this and repression that and loneliness and lost childhood and _fuck_ all of that, this is why you two never talk, nevermind the fact that she’s probably halfway down a bottle and all the way moved into Kanaya’s room and hasn’t answered any of your messages in days and neither has Terezi but it’s _fine_ because you don’t mind the quiet, really, and even if you did that’s what he’s here for, and fuck it you’re not supposed to be _thinking—_ )

You pull away from him. He doesn’t lean back in. Just looks at you, all yellow sclera and fucking scowl and he’s not even attractive, even if you were into guys, and admittedly you’re not opposed to the teeth, and you’ve always thought freckles were cute, but he just frowns all the time and he’s so goddamn unpleasant that it ruins it. And the fucking staring.

But it ain’t like you’ve got options.

“What, dude,” you say. The hot dog stand is still held by one hand from each of you. You pull yours away. “Don’t need to be getting your stare on, I’m not going anywhere.”

He scoffs. “You’re a fucking terrible kisser.”

“’Least I got more practice than you, man.” It isn’t true. Corpse-smooching aside, you’ve never… You and Terezi never kissed. Just sat close to each other. Talked bullshit. You tried to hold her hand once but she startled and in pulling away her nails scratched against your palm so roughly they nearly broke through your skin. But it isn’t like he’s done any more. (But, what do you know? You didn’t think it was that bad.) “What, you’re gonna offer to give me lessons? Some sort of professor in the school of macking? Be honest with me, dude, how many movies have you watched with that exact dumbass plot?”

“Fuck you!” he says, pushing away from you. The pads of his fingers linger on your shirt for a second. “Anything that requires kissing you again, I will kindly fucking pass. I know, I’m doing an indescribable disservice to every other miserable creature who will ever have the future misfortune of being kissed by Dave fucking Strider. Credit to Terezi for putting up with you.”

“Oh dude, come on, you can’t still be on about the Terezi bullshit.”

He flushes and, for all you know that troll skin is thicker than yours, he still gets all red in the face. “I’m _not_.”

“She’s fully in clown town, man, no getting her back from there.”

“I just—” He makes some angry sputtering sound, and then groans, face in his hands. Not a fucking ounce of chill, and he doesn’t even seem to _care_. “I just... don’t think he’s good for her.”

You roll your eyes, even if he can’t see it behind the shades. “Bro, you gave a fucking hour-long rant about why _I_ wasn’t good for her either, and I didn’t fucking kill anybody. Face it, Karkat, it ain’t about me or Gamzee, it’s about you.”

He looks ready to punch you. Good fucking luck, dude. You’ve got that dodge. “If you could suspend your self-important, faux-detached narrative for a single fucking second, you might realize that it’s a little more likely that I’m worried about my long time friend than that I’m still hung up on a girl I liked when I was six!”

“What— oh, fuck, you mean what twelve? You gotta abandon the dumbass troll vernacular, man.”

The sound he makes sounds more bug than human, and his whole species is so fucking weird, and how did you even date _one_ of them and, damn, you want to kiss him again. Like, holy shit. You’re just looking at his fucking _teeth_ and you don’t even catch what the fuck he’s saying until he’s moving to stand. “— doing literally _anything_ would be better than listening to a single other inane fucking word—”

“Okay, dude,” you say, grab his sleeve, and kiss him.

It’s a half-second of awkward-angle and his tooth poking your lip before he unceremoniously shoves you off of him. “Stop fucking doing that! I’m not into you, I’m not looking for a kismesis, certainly not somebody—”

“Karkat, man, I ain’t even got the slightest goddamn idea what you’re on about.” You know it’s one of the troll relationships, but they’re all so fucking dumbass that you never learned to differentiate them. From what you can tell, it’s all just simple nuance of normal feelings that some full-of-themselves aliens decided to put words on like it meant something. Bullshit.

“Oh, really, you don’t? You fucking _kiss me_ and then spend the next ten minutes insulting me and being generally obstinate and insufferable, then kiss me _again_? I don’t fucking see you like that, sorry to disappoint, so if you’d kindly fuck off—”

“Ah shit, is that the hatefuck one?” You rest your head in the palm of your hand. “Yeah, man, really. That ain’t my lane. Look, I’m not gonna fuck with any of this quadrant bullshit, but I can promise the riling you up has nothing to do with the kiss thing, and it certainly ain’t some signalling that I want a relationship. I don’t. I’m not into you either, dude. I’m not—” The word gets caught in your throat (more fucking _quiet_ ). But that’s _fine_. It ain’t even like he knows what it means. “Look, you’re not my type.”

“And is that why you can’t let me leave without hanging onto me and fucking _assaulting me_?”

Oh. You’re still holding his sleeve. You let go. “Sorry, man. You can go whenever, I was just bored. Everybody else on this rock is getting that sweet kiss action, and we’re sitting around acting like we’re _not_ horny teenagers with nothing to do. I was just— thinking about a casual thing. If you ain’t into that, though, it’s cool.”

He just looks at you for a second, _again_ , like he’s trying to take you apart with a stare, and you know he _can’t_ , you know how fucking perfect you’ve got that shades-on, lips-straight, unreadable-as-all-hell look, but it almost makes your shoulders tense, anyway. Cause he’s just looking at you and not saying anything and maybe it actually _wouldn’t_ be cool if he isn’t into this, and you know he can’t see that but what if— “I’ll think about it,” he says, finally, and yeah, guess your shoulders were tensed, cause you can physically feel them relax.

“Cool.”

He stands up, and you don’t grab onto him, or kiss him, or anything as goddamn embarrassing as that again. “Bye,” he says, like that’s just _it_ , and maybe it is. The room is already quiet.

“Wait, dude,” you call, and he looks at you. “Don’t— let’s not tell anybody, okay?” You know what Rose will think, all quirked eyebrow and acting like she knows you, knows this _thing_ about you that ain’t even true, when she’s barely fucking talked to you in weeks. Besides, it just ain’t her business. Hers or Kanaya’s or your ex’s or the fucking clown’s. If this is gonna be a thing, it’s gonna be _yours_.

He rolls his eyes. “As we’ve made perfectly fucking clear, neither of us have anybody but each other right now. Who the fuck would we tell?”

And then he leaves.

And it’s really goddamn quiet.

* * *

You don’t see him for the next few days, which is fine. Y’all didn’t have any set plans; besides, you pass Terezi when leaving the kitchen area on the second day, and she gives you a forced smile and a wave, before she’s rushing off somewhere, so it ain’t even like you go the whole time without seeing anybody. He needs time to think, and it ain’t like you’re hanging out with each other every day anyway, so.

It’s fine.

Couple of days later, there’s knocking on your door, and you know it’s him, even though you don’t go to each other’s places too often. Too personal. Not common space. But the sound of fist-on-door is so goddamn loud that there ain’t a person else it could belong to, even if there was anyone else clambering to come see you and not being insular and avoidant. 

“Hey, man,” you say, opening the door.

“Strider.” He steps inside (heavy ass footsteps) and closes the door behind him. You’re leaning against the doorframe, and he walks around you, ‘til he’s parallel to the wall and you’re in the small space between him and it.

You step back on instinct, and your back is against the wall, and he’s just looking at you (again). His hands go to the side of your face, calloused against your skin, and he shifts onto his toes so that your faces are very, very close. (It occurs to you, you haven’t brushed your teeth yet today. Fuck.) His eyes dart over your face, and he’s close enough that you can see the streaks of red in the dark of his irises. It’s kind of pretty.

“Alright?” He asks, a breath away from your face.

“Yeah,” you answer.

And he kisses you.

Your hands — shaking, for some dumbass reason — go hesitantly to his waist. He slides one hand down your neck, to wrap around your shoulders. He shifts forward, his knees knocking against yours, his chest and yours flush, and you are pressed between him and the wall and you can feel his heartbeat — _loud_ — you cannot remember the last time you had this much touch and—

And it _aches_.

You have no room to pull away (his hair brushes against your forehead, pads of his fingers on the high point of your cheekbone, soft and warm and _touch_ ), so you bring a hand to his face and gently push him back. And he goes.

You miss the warmth and you feel sick.

He opens his eyes. You look at him. He looks at you. He’s still warm. Your chest still aches. You want to— do _something_. You don’t know what. Kiss him again, yeah. Run the fuck away and speak to no one for a week, also yeah. You want to keep looking at him.

He steps back. “Your mouth tastes awful.”

It takes you a second ( _ache for warmth and press of chest and the sound of his heartbeat and yours_ ), but you manage to force a shrug. “Sorry, dude. Wasn’t planning on macking on anybody, today, didn’t think I had to get up at early-ass o’clock to brush my teeth just to give you a better kissing experience.” And then, your mouth moving faster than your head, “I can do that now, if you want?”

He tilts his head, and you hope that means he’s thinking over whether he wants you to go do that and not that he’s thinking about the note of pathetic clinging to your voice. Eventually, he scrunches up his face with a shrug and a, “In a minute.” His hands are still on your shoulders, but he’s settled back onto his feet, so you are looking down at him, just slightly. “Are we going to do this?”

“Prolly not if we’re just talking about it.”

“Dave.” He looks at you, light and dark of his eyes through his eyelashes which are, honestly, kind of nice. “I think we should, actually, have the slightest fucking conversation about this! This is objectively a bad idea but we’re—”

“Bored and horny. Dude, I get it. It’s awkward as shit to talk about, so let’s fucking stop.” You don’t want to talk about this. You don’t want him to draw this out, make you overthink it, cause there ain’t even anything to overthink. This isn’t more than it is. You barely want to be thinking about it when it’s happening. “We can fuck around like this, and when we get to the new session and eventually make a world where there are actual people, and we aren’t so goddamn alone, we’ll quit it.”

Karkat nods. He doesn’t seem riled up by the information at all, which would probably be a good sign, if riled wasn’t his norm. “Yes, exactly. This is circumstance and convenience.” You nod back. “However, if you’d ever bother to allow yourself the premium experience of watching any movies with me, you’d realize we are in the exact dumbass starting place for an innumerable amount of romantic relationships. And that’s not where we’re going with this.” He gestured a cutting motion with his hand. He has nice hands. “I just want a fucking promise from you, and from me, that we aren’t going to end up in some bullshit ass-backwards pity because we were so mutually miserable that we had to enter a friends-with-benefits relationship with the only other asshole desperate enough to talk to us.”

“You got the tough side of that deal, man. People fucking line up for these Strider charms.”

His lip curls as he scoffs, and you can see the uneven expanse of his teeth and his weird, not-quite-human tongue. Y’all are spending way too long talking. “Where’s the fucking line, asshole? I’m looking, fucking scouring the block but wait! It doesn’t exist. You’re just as lonely and pathetic and unwanted as me, so you don’t get to take any sort of bullshit high ground!”

“Dude, can you please shut up.” You don’t _want_ to talk about this, holy shit, you’d take the fucking quiet over this and, over that, you’d take kissing him again. “Look, it’s not gonna be a _thing_ for me. I don’t like dudes. Sorry, but I just ain’t wired to be into guys and that has crossed you off my list from day one.”

He’s scowling like that’s somehow offensive to him. “That is absolute human bullshit, that is _entirely_ contradicted by everything you do and say, but it happens to be contradictory human bullshit that works in my favor so, fine. You’re ‘not into dudes’. Good.”

“Good.” And it is. Good. Not that there’s something bad about guys who are into that but. That just ain’t you and that’s fine. “You sure you can keep from falling from me, man?”

He scowls, face fully twisted up, not hiding a thing. “I think I’ll manage to fight the overwhelming urge to pity some irreverent prick with a tangled list of complexes long enough to span from here to the Green Sun.” He shoves your shoulder. “Go brush your fucking teeth.”

“Anything for you, babe,” you tease, catching the hand he shoved you with and pressing it to your chest. As a joke. Part of the tease. He’s warm. 

You let go.

And you go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> good evening and welcome to Dave Looking at Karkat, the novella
> 
> but seriously i hope youve enjoyed this first chapter!! i actually wrote this fic as somewhat of a companion fic to my main big retcon timeline davekat fic, [the soapbox](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26148022). If the tone of this piece felt lonely or sad or emotionally stilted, that was done purposefully to counter the more emotionally-honest, community-based nature of the soapbox. the soapbox already has five chapters (of ten) published if you want to catch up, and are interested in how i think dave and karkat would develop their relationship if they were like actually friends first, and if they had strong support systems outside each other, and if dave had the time to develop a single ounce of emotional maturity before rushing headfirst into a relationship while still fully in the closet. and if vriska was around.
> 
> with the self-promo aside, i really do hope you've enjoyed!! i would be delighted to hear what you thought!! (this goes triple if you have, by chance, read any of the soapbox, because these two works are meant to reference each other.) and, of course, kudos are my lifeblood, and i would love one if youd be willing to spare!
> 
> beyond that, thank yall so so much for reading! this fic is almost entirely pre-written so i hope to update weekly-ish!! hope you all sleep very well <333


	2. Chapter 2

“Dude, what the fuck?”

“What?” he calls back, from the next room. You just finished watching one of his bullshit romcoms, if by ‘watch’ you mean ‘get five minutes into and spend the rest of the time making out until said movie ends or one of you has to get up to piss’. In this case, it was both, and couple minutes later, you’re staring at yourself under the broken fluorescent light in the bathroom mirror, wondering how the fuck you got to this point.

“Karkat, come here.”

You hear some dramatic ass groan from the couch, followed by a series of heavy footfalls, and then you can see him next to you in the mirror. “Okay, I’m here, what the fuck is such a big—”

You turn to look at him and point at the fucking _bite mark_ on your neck. Not hickey, not bruise, not even some elegant, two-fanged vamp shit. Bitemark. “I reiterate,” you say, far more calm than you feel, “dude, what the fuck.”

He scoffs and rolls his eyes, flush high in his cheeks. “Well, I’m sorry no one informed me how weak and paper-thin human skin was! I didn’t _realize_ you as a species hadn’t evolved past the weakest layer of external protection imaginable!”

You can still see the mark in the mirror, already turning red because _yeah_ , that’s gonna fucking bruise, not even to mention— “Karkat, it’s _bleeding_.”

He rolls his eyes. “Get a fucking band-aid! What, you need me to put it on for you, too? Do I look like your lusus?”

You rub at the spot till the (admittedly very little) blood comes off on your hand. “You know, man, I thought Kanaya was the only vamp on the meteor. Surprised I gotta up that count.”

“If I was a rainbow drinker, I’d want to actually _consume_ your disgusting human-red blood, and to everyone’s massive surprise, your apparent fang fetish isn’t worth permanently ruining my palate!” You consider this concept for a moment. Before Rose fucked off, you used to make fun of her for the vampire thing. She ain’t around to turn that on you, but you should probably chill on the thinking about his teeth, regardless. “Is that it?”

“I mean, there’s still the issue of the obvious fucking bruise that’s gonna come up.” You tap the bitemark. “Thought we were trying to go covert on this.”

“It isn’t my fault a feature of your red asshole pajamas isn’t a scarf.” As he’s speaking, he starts taking his big ass sweater off, and eventually pushes it to you. “There, turtleneck. You’re fucking welcome.”

“Dude, you gotta realize this ain’t any stealthier.” The wool is soft in your hands, and it smells like him. Something about that makes your stomach twist.

“Do I have to fucking do everything? If someone _actually fucking asks_ , which is unlikely as hell, say that you were cold and I wasn’t such an asshole that I wouldn’t give my friend a sweater! Nothing fucking implied there, just—”

“Are we friends?” You interrupt, the question spoken without your intention. 

You don’t get a response, for a second. You look up at him. He’s taken aback, hands pulled back to his chest and eyebrows furrowed. Lips parted, corners turned downwards.

This makes your stomach twist for entirely different reasons.

“Aw fuck, dude, I’m sorry,” you apologize, before he can get a word out. “Obviously we’re friends, can’t do the friends-with-benefits bullshit without it, I just. We’d never really said it.”

“Yeah,” he responds, and nothing else.

“Karkat.” What else do you say? You pull on the turtleneck, all wool and warm and the smell of him around you. “Thanks for the sweater.”

He does look up at you then, seeming a bit better off. “Like I said, you’re fucking welcome.”

Because you’re shit at talking and you want to, you place a hand on his waist and another on the back of his neck, and kiss him. He kisses back, hands around your shoulders, your skin warm-turned-hot beneath the sweater.

He pulls away. “I’m going back to my block.”

“You can stay, dude,” you offer, before really thinking it over. The implications of that are what they are, and even beyond that— just sleeping next to him, you in his sweater and him warm beside you…

That’s not what you signed up for.

(The twist of your stomach goes light and fluttery with the thought, and you tell it to quit that.)

He shakes his head. “Not tonight. Sometime.”

It’s probably for the best, you tell yourself. (And you guess your command worked, cause you’re not so light and fluttery anymore.)

“’Lright. Night, Karkat.”

“Goodnight, Dave.” He leans up, presses one last kiss to your mouth, then walks, all heavy footsteps and muttering, out of your room. You watch him until he disappears through the door.

You’re ready to turn in, before catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror.

The turtleneck serves its purpose, the mark completely hidden by the thick fabric. It fits alright, too; it was oversized to begin with so, besides being a bit short in the torso and arms, it still hangs loosely over you. Warm. Doesn’t even look too bad, over the red of your pants. Gray and crimson, more complimentary than you’d’ve guessed. You study at your reflection, and you look… you’re not smiling, not quite, but you look content. Comfortable. Like… 

Like you’re… 

God, what the fuck are you _doing_?

“Fuck,” you say, to no one but yourself. “ _Fuck_.”

Fucking look at you, admiring yourself in some shitty turtleneck. All giddy over some guy giving you his sweater like you’re his fucking _girlfriend_.

If your stomach was twisted before, now it’s being wrung out. 

You pull the sweater off, leave it in a pile by your feet. You’re cold without, and the fucking bitemark is visible again, and the smell of him still clings to your torso but this is better. It’s better. You’re not that kinda guy, you’re not gonna be that guy.

He’s not your boyfriend. You don’t _want_ him to be. You aren’t—

You aren’t.

You’re _not_.

You lean forward against the vanity, and you see yourself. See the reddish splotch on your neck, the barely-there marks of teeth.

Fine. Whatever.

Not like anyone talks to you enough to notice.

* * *

You’re trying to get back into making music.

The beat you’ve been laboring over for the last few hours ain’t sounding right, but you can’t tell if that’s cause you’re two years out of a regular practice, or cause your headphones have gone to shit and you can’t hear jack from the left side. You decide the second of those is easier to check, so you unplug the cable and set it to play out loud.

It doesn’t get more than three seconds in before your musical accomplishments are celebrated with a kick to the thigh.

“What the fuck is this?” Karkat asks, looking up from the notebook he’s been scribbling in as long as y’all have been in can town. (You usually opt for more privacy when around him — not that you see anybody, really, but you don’t want to risk Rose drunkenly stumbling into when you’re making out with him and drawing all sorts of bullshit conclusions — but he decided that he was sick of spending time in his room and he generally refuses to ‘go within an earth mile of the horrific sewage container that is your block’, so, can town.) 

“A Strider original tune, dude.” You push off of the couch to stand. “Getting that unreleased, uncut shit, all VIP. Historians gonna be looking for this version, man, lamenting that they can’t hear the steps that lead me to being the first ever god/world class entertainer.”

“Cause the god part has worked out great so far!” You wave off his jab. Dude’s a fucking liar, anyway, cause you know he’s into it. He’s leaning on his hand, as if unimpressed, but you can see his foot moving, just slightly, in time with the music.

“I see you, man, you’re feeling the vibe.” He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, dude, think I gotta be playing my tunes out loud more, can’t let the public miss out on this. Why haven’t we talked the Mayor into getting a disco yet?”

He leans over to flick at an empty can propped on the end table. It topples over. “Probably because even cans of goddamn Tab aren’t so desperate for music than they’d settle for yours?”

You step around the various cantowers, holding your fingers up in that dumb square thing photographers do, like looking for the right place to erect your can dance hall. “Nah, I think we could get a really swinging joint happening here. Underground, secret, real _Footloose_ shit.” (Y’all ‘watched’ _Footloose_ last week. Most of your memory of that night is dedicated to the feeling of your fingers in his soft, tangled hair, but you’re pretty sure the movie’s about covert-ass discos.) “Come on, you eat that shit up. You really wouldn’t dance with me, dude?” It’s a tease, all in line with your joking around, you don’t mean it. You’re holding a hand out, a _joke_ , needling him without any expectation for him to rise to the bait.

That’s on you for not thinking he would.

He huffs, rolls his eyes, and stands up, stepping carefully to keep on the streets without jostling any storefronts. Once he’s in front of you, he stays arms-crossed for a moment, before — with all the dramatism you’ve come to expect from him — he gives you a look, grabs your hand, and yanks you to him. Which means you’re doing this.

It’s a fucking mess — neither of you can dance for shit, even if you were trying. But that really ain’t y’all’s focus. It’s a contest more than anything else, grabbing at each others’ hands, pulling each other all kinds of ways, taking the beat as more a suggestion than any sort of guideline. There’s the added dexterity challenge, both of you constantly checking your feet to make sure you ain’t crushing any beloved monuments, or smudging clear road signs— Mayor’s _strict_ on those traffic regulations, and you ain’t risking some hard time in the Can Penitentiary.

He grabs you by the waist at one point, pulls you flush to him. You shove him away, not too hard. He nearly falls over into Tab Walmart (his naming, not yours, dude refuses to be creative with you) anyway — “Dude, gotta be wary of the architecture, it’s all balance, that shit ain’t glued” — but you catch him. Hand on the small of his back, his arms between y’all’s chests, him at just a slight angle, and you get a great fucking idea. 

“Oh, _dude—_ ”

He seems to realize the exact position he’s in, and immediately his half-amused, not-smile expression goes full scowl, and he starts shoving at your chest, “You asshole, don’t you _fucking_ dare—”

You’re already dipping him. 

You go a little bold on the angle — his spine nearly parallels the ground — but you’re pretty sure you’ve got this. He stops pushing you, which helps. He’s still got that grimace, eyes narrowed so he’s more dark-circles than sclera, and you’re grinning, feeling pretty self-satisfied, especially cause you know his grimaces, now, and this one means he’s into it. Or at least, tolerating it. He makes it extremely fucking clear when there’s something he doesn’t tolerate.

Speaking of toleration, you get a little caught up in the warmth of him in your arms and the eye contact and how you could swear to fuck that the corner of his mouth is turned up, _just a bit_ — that you really ain’t paying attention to how much weight your arms can support, for how long. And your arms? They ain’t doing good.

“Oh shit,” you say, and promptly drop him.

He topples about three different can structures on his way down, but manages to completely block out that sound with the goddamn litany of curses aimed directly at you. Prolly cause you for sure laughed when you let him go. You’re not a complete dick, though, so you move to where you could help him up without you yourself knocking cans over — but, like the self-sabotaging asshole he is, he grabs your ankle in his fucking vice-grip. And he yanks you to the ground.

You make a sound you wouldn’t identify as a yelp to anyone but yourself, cause _fuck_ man, the ground is hard and that might’ve actually hurt your shoulder, plus now you’re half on top of him, which means he’s bitching even _more_ , till he shoves you off of him, sending you crashing into the carefully constructed CanTown Hall, and then you’re collapsed on the ground, shades wholly eschew, various cans scattered over your body where they landed.

You look over at him. He looks over at you. Y’all are a fucking sight, surely. Two assholes lying in the ruins of downtown Can Town, covered in cans and dusted in floor chalk. He has the green of Cantral Park smudged on his cheek, just under his eye. He’s glaring at you, but you can see a slight quirk of his lips. You can feel more than that, on yours.

You start laughing, and he immediately follows.

You’re eyes-shut and chest-heaving with it, and you force out a near-wheeze — “ _Dude_ ” — but even if you had anything to follow it with, you don’t think you have the air to get it out. You open your eyes to look at him, and he has a hand over his mouth, but his laugh is still loud as fuck, nearly blocking yours out with his cackles. You barely ever see the dude smile, and aside from a few small, snort-like chuckles, you’ve never heard him _laugh_. Not like this.

You really fucking like it.

You don’t have time to dwell on that, cause he sees you looking, tries to straighten his expression, fails miserably, and instead, throws a fucking can at you. It hits you square in the chest. You scoff, faux-affronted. You sit up, and try to see through the laugh-tears fogging your vision in order to land a hit on him, and don’t see if you do or not. It doesn’t matter. But he fires back, and then y’all are throwing cans at each other, like a pair of goddamn kids playing on a street.

It’s dumb as shit. It’s really fun, too.

Eventually, you both tire of it, and find that you’ve ended up close, knee-to-knee amongst piles of dented cans, still laughing. Yours have faded to mostly-silent giggles, and he’s just breathing heavy through his smile. He’s not covering his mouth anymore, so you can see it, the jagged teeth through the wide part of his lips, the scrunch of his nose and upturn of eyebrows. The way he looks just slightly to the side when he catches you looking. Whole thing completely changes his face.

You think he should do it more.

You don’t say that, though. You don’t say anything. You’re not trying to sound like some grocery-store self-help book, even to yourself, but there’s something important about being in this moment. Wordless and shoulder-sore and still-just-laughing. Your shitty music playing in a loop under the background, the beat continuing on, like something under the surface. You don’t kiss him, even though you could, and he doesn’t try to kiss you. 

There’s _something_. 

You think you both get it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> self indulgence? in MY fic??
> 
> anyway
> 
> this chapter is short! next chapter is longer, and gets into some shit, so i wanted to write something to kind of pad that, and build up this relationship, and deal a Bit more with daves whole. intern ilized home of phobia. king just really is Not working through it.
> 
> keeping the note short too, so just, thanks so dang much for reading!! im really trying to get better at responding to comments, but suffice it to say, I really appreciate hearing from yall! i just like Talking about these characters so please just!! throw me your takes!!! i am Interested!!! (kudos are, of course, also beloved by me). good night y'all!!! till we meet again <33


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: dave being angsty

You haven’t left his room in three days.

It’s a weird realization to have, lying on the floor with one earbud in, drawing some shitty comic on your equally shitty tablet, but in the corner of your eye, you see a flicker in the thin light streaming from under his door, and you think about his door, and the corridor, and the meteor, and realize you haven’t crossed that threshold in days.

And you don’t even care.

You all but moved in weeks ago. Sure, you still have a room back on the other side of the meteor, with extra outfits and other bullshit, but your clothes are in his drawers, your toothbrush in his bathroom, you alchemized a bed so y’all wouldn’t have to deal with bullshit troll sleep-tube. It’s your space as much as it is his. And you don’t leave it.

“Morning.” You look up and see him, walking out of the bathroom, dressed inasmuch as either of y’all even get dressed anymore. Different set of clothes, still essentially pajamas. He stretches, and you study the lines of his body, the stripe of red-tinted grey skin visible where his shirt rides up. There are, somehow, freckles on his torso.

You like looking at him.

“Morning, dude.” You raise a single hand in greeting, before pushing off the ground to shift to a sitting position. “How’d you sleep?”

“Aside from dealing with some asshole who feels a need to spread out over the entire sleep slab like the human embodiment of a plague, fine.” He settles down next to you, presses his body against your side, and rests his head in the curve of your neck and shoulder. You put your arm around his waist. He’s wearing your shirt — a bit too long on him — and you put your hand under the fabric to press against the skin of his side. Warm in the cold room. “This looks fucking awful,” he says, with a half-there movement of his chin towards the panel you’re working on.

“Yeah, dude, that’s kind of the point.” You look at him out of the corner of your eye as he pretends not to read the comic. He gets to the end, and snorts, trying and failing to force down a smile. “I see you, man. Getting all kinds of laughter from my high-class literature.”

He shoves you with his shoulder, but you just use the movement to pull him closer, running your hand over his side. “The complete fucking lack of sleep clearly addled my brain. Don’t take this as a compliment.”

“Yeah, yeah, dude.”

You settle back into drawing, lulled by the feeling of his breath, chest rising and falling against you. He grabs one the many romance novels he keeps in neat stacks by the bed, contrasting by your multitude of half-empty juice bottles and printed comic pages that indiscriminately litter the floor. He opens to the middle, no bookmark, and starts to read. You’d make some quip about the books all being the same, that he can start and stop any of them and always be caught up on plot, but you’ve made the joke already and. Besides.

You like how content he looks.

“Hey Karkat,” you ask, after a second. He makes a low, affirmative sound in response. “Is it fucked up that we’ve been in this room for three days straight?”

“We have food.” He doesn’t look up from the page. He’s speaking slowly, so you think he’s paying more attention to the book than you.

“Yeah, man, I know.” You hoard snacks like you’ve got a brother who doesn’t feed you, and trolls put everything in piles, various Alternian foodstuffs included, so you’ve been fine on that front. Won’t last forever, but you can deal when you get there. “We got a real sweet setup, natch. Canburbia’s looking all kinds of gentrified in here, and we should fucking address the roots of folks fleeing NYCan to live here, and we can cause, to my point, the Mayor’s around all the time, so the point is shit’s good in here. Got food, got can town, got the Mayor. Not like there’s anything out there for us to do.”

“Or anyone to talk to.”

“Yeah, exactly.” You pause. He doesn’t fill in the quiet. “So it ain’t fucked up. We’re good.”

“Yeah.”

You draw the curve of Hella Bro’s mouth, then shut off your tablet. “Kanaya and Rose are doing the same thing. And Terezi and Gamzee. Fucking hiding themselves away for days at a time, not speaking to anybody or even getting a breath of what we really can’t fucking call ‘fresh’ air, can we, cause it’s all the same fucking air, all the goddamn time, circulating through a fucking meteor and the point is we’re fine.”

He closes the book. Turns just far enough that his head is still on your shoulder, but he’s looking at you, circles dark beneath his eyes. “The door isn’t locked, Dave. You can leave whenever you want.”

“I know that, man. I know.” You are holding your stylus tight enough that the metal clip digs into the flesh of your hand. You drop it. “I don’t.” You run a hand through your hair. “The thing is, dude, I don’t even want to.”

He furrows his brow, head tilted. Hand already going back to his book. “So, then…”

“I shouldn’t— I should fucking want to, right? But I don’t. I’m— dude, I’m fucking _comfortable_ here. I—” What the fuck are you _saying_? “Like, I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to go make breakfast or check my phone or find Rose, I just want to stay here with— just stay here and draw stupid comics and eat junk food and—” You push off the ground, sudden enough that he nearly falls over into the space where you were a half-second ago. “And that’s kind of fucked up.”

He rights himself and leans back against the bedframe. Looks up to where you’re pacing around the room. Beginnings of a scowl. “It’s fucked up that you might actually enjoy my company?”

“You know what, dude? Maybe.” You make it to the other side of the room, grab a — shockingly unopened — bottle of juice, and start walking back. “I don’t know, man. I’m just— I’m living in your goddamn _room_ , Karkat. How the fuck did this happen?”

His upper-lip is curled back halfway, but his hands are relaxed, not in fists, so he isn’t really pissed. Why the fuck do you _know_ that? “Well, you never wanted to walk all the way from can town to your block. That’s how it ‘happened’. Any other reasons behind it are your fucking business.” You try to open the bottle but your hands are sweaty and the cap keeps slipping through your fingers. “Are you going to sit back down or leave? Cause if you’re going I’d appreciate it if you’d bring back some actual fucking food.”

“We didn’t use to do this.” You pass by him and you still haven’t managed to open the bottle, so you toss it down on the mattress. He rolls his eyes and picks it up. “Like, there was never any shit about how you’d just expect me to come back at night. We used to just— see each other sometimes. Unplanned. Jesus.”

“Are you having a fucking crisis right now?” He easily opens the bottle and holds it up to you. You grab it and take a sip. First thing you’ve had today, and it’s really goddamn sweet, and your fingers are warm where they brushed his, and your stomach is tight. “I don’t know what you want me to say to this, Dave. Our relationship has changed after a few perigees of regularly making out. Fucking unbelievable! What about it?”

And really, what about it? That’s what’s been good about fucking locking yourself away with him, not reaching out to anyone and not looking to see if anyone’s reached out to you. Nobody to question you. Let yourself live like— like you’re his— _whatever_ , just live with him and you and nothing and nobody else, let yourself be fucking _content_ with it, and don’t think about it. Head quiet except for thoughts about him.

This is your own goddamn fault.

“I mean, that was the point of this, right?” You drink more of the juice, and don’t quite swallow it before you start talking again. “A bit of fucking contentment? Not being so goddamn lonely? And that’s what we got.” You’re going to choke. “So it’s _fine_.”

“Exactly,” he says, like this was the point you were always going to get to. “Dave.” He, finally, stands, walks over till he’s directly blocking the path of your pace. He settles his hands on your bare arms, thumbs rubbing small circles in your skin. “I think you’re working yourself up over nothing. If you like this, like living here, it’s fine. Maybe we’re codependent, or some other bullshit, but that’s a lot fucking better than being lonely and depressed! You’re… allowed to be happy. If you are. If I— if _this_ makes you happy—”

“It shouldn’t.” You keep your hands around the cool glass of the bottle. “What we’re doing, dude, it’s supposed to be casual. Friends-with-benefits bullshit. It wasn’t supposed to— Jesus, dude, I didn’t even _like_ you.” He flinches back, hurt flashing over his face in the tight press of his lips and narrowed eyes. He’s so fucking transparent. “When we started, I mean. We weren’t friends. I wasn’t supposed to—” What, care about him? Christ. You sound like such a fucking— “And whatever the fuck this is now. Acting like— I mean, Karkat, it’s not like we’re _dating_.” 

“I… Aren’t we?” You make eye contact, fast and expression-tight and breath caught in your chest. “I know we made an agreement, ages ago, and it isn’t like this fits in with any goddamn quadrant, and honestly, I don’t think we should try to force it into one! I don’t want to define this any more than you do. But you live in my fucking block! I sleep on your dumb human sleep slab, I’m wearing your clothes— what else would this even _be_?”

“We’re not dating,” you reiterate. What the fuck else is there to say? Your heart feels like it’s beating too-slow too-fast too-much in your chest. “Dude we’re not— I don’t— I ain’t that kinda guy.”

He throws his hands in the air, stepping back away from you, and you miss the feeling of his skin on yours. That doesn’t mean anything. You’re just touch-starved and lonely and he’s who’s _here_. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“I told you, day one, that I’m not into dudes. That’s fucking immutable, I—”

“Clearly fucking not, Strider, because whether your head is all the way up your ass in denial or not, you’re into me!” You flinch back, away from him. “You kiss me, you live with me, and even with your faux-cool ‘shades’, don’t think I haven’t noticed that you look at me _all the goddamn time_. It’s a fucking lot! And you know it’s a fucking lot, because I normally can’t fathom why _anyone_ would want to be around me, let alone be _attracted_ to me, and even _I_ know you are!”

“I’m—” Your face is hot. Fuck. Fuck. You keep your expression flat, you know you ain’t showing anything, but if he looks close he’s gonna see how fucking pink your skin is gonna get, and why the fuck did you bring this up? “Look, man, I’m sorry, but I’m not. As I’ve made very fucking clear, I like this, I like what we do, but that doesn’t change this _thing_ about me. I’m not attracted to guys.”

Nothing you do with him is real. It’s founded off simple premises— it’s casual, it don’t mean shit, you’re lonely and would take anyone you can get. In this case, that’s him. Doesn’t matter that he’s a guy, you don’t have to think about that when you make out with or sleep next to him. No one else is looking in, you’re fine.

You want to be done talking about this.

He catches your wrist with his hand. “Dave—” 

“Drop it.” You pull your arm out of his grasp. Something in your tone— cold, conclusive, as it should always be, is apparently convincing enough. He presses his mouth into a line and pulls his hand to his chest. “Look, dude. Sorry I brought this up. Just. Just drop it, okay.”

“ _Dave—_ ”

“I’m gonna get some fresh air. W’ever the fuck that means.” You walk back towards the door till you hit it with your shoulder. “See ya.”

You look at him out of the corner of your eye, trusting in the dark of your shades to cover any way he might be looking in. Any lingering fight leaves him, shoulders-drooped and looking-askance. “Bye.”

You give one hand-raise of a wave, before walking out the door. It closes slow behind you.

You hover, still and tense-shouldered, in the space for a minute. Thinking about him. His shoulders under your hands. His body pressed to yours at night. His small snort of a laugh. His voice— ‘ _You look at me all the goddamn time_.’ 

You punch the wall.

You regret it immediately. It doesn’t do shit except scrape your knuckles raw and red and leave an ache in your fingers. You don’t feel better. But this is how you do things. This is how chill guys deal with shit. Sunglasses and forced down expressions and hitting whatever can’t hit back.

The problem, you diagnose, is that you tried to talk about it.

Won’t happen again, that’s for fucking sure. Let the quiet be quiet, don’t fuck with it with your bullshit worries. Shit don’t matter. Shit’s fine when you don’t talk about it. Yeah.

You wipe your bloodied hand on your pants — won’t stain the red — and you walk on.

Nowhere to go.

* * *

“Hey dude,” you call, two dishes hot in your hands as you kick his door in a pseudo-knock. “Karkat, little help? My hands are full, can you get this?”

You don’t hear anything, any sounds of movement, from the crack in the door, and figure, maybe you’ve been gone long enough that he’s fallen asleep, or fucked off to somewhere else in the meteor. (Or he’s actually pissed, really, and hedging your bets with microwave dinner won’t make up for the dumb shit you put him through.) But after a tense moment and kicking the door hard enough your toe might bruise, you hear his heavy ass footsteps plod across the room. And he opens the door.

“Strider,” he says, all even tone and furrowed brow. His arms are crossed over his chest and he must’ve, at some point, maybe immediately, abandoned your shirt in favor of one of his. He is leaning purposefully away from you, not quite making eye contact and, yeah, you might’ve fucked this up.

You don’t want to fuck this up.

You attempt a half-smile, but it feels forced and wrong on your face, so you drop it. “Hi, man.” You tilt your head in the direction of his room. “Can I come in? I, uh, I brought food.” You raise the plates up an inch or so, as if it wasn’t fucking obvious that’s what you were carrying.

He doesn’t say anything for a second, just purses his lips and tightens his hand around the side of the door. Like he might close it in your face. Like he knows this is a bullshit apology. But he lets go, looks away, and gestures you through.

You never made a table for the room, so you bring the food to his ( _your_ ) bed. You really don’t know shit about troll cuisine, and you weren’t quite at a point where you wanted to track down Kanaya or Terezi to ask, but you found some sort of troll TV dinner in the freezer and guessed at the heating instructions, cause fuck if you’re gonna learn Alternian. You set his plate down opposite to you and, after a moment, he follows and sits.

You’re in the process of trying to pick up microwaved ramen with chopsticks you’ve forgotten how to use, when you notice he’s staring at you. “What?” you ask, and the noodles fall back into the styrofoam cup.

“What are you doing?”

You give up on the chopsticks and grab the fork from next to his plate. He ain’t using it. “Besides giving you a tutorial on how not to eat ramen, you asked me to bring food, so I brought food. Sorry if it ain’t heated all the way, nobody even taught me how to cook for humans, let alone whatever bullshit trolls got.”

True to your guess, after a skeptical look at the blue-grey pile of what might be insect spaghetti, he neglects any of the other utensils in favor of picking up the noodles(?) with his bare hands and bringing them to his mouth. You’ve seen him eat before, and it’s always like this, but. Goddamn. You watch him, pasta and hand and mouth and claws and teeth, and it’s so fucking dumb, and kinda gross, honestly, but that’s just what he’s like, and this time your half-smile isn’t forced, and—

You do look at him all the time, don’t you?

He finishes chewing, as you look away, fixing your attention down at your already-tepid cup of soup, only glancing up at him subtly enough that you don’t move your face, so he won’t see. (He said he could tell, even with the sunglasses, but that’s bullshit.) “It’s fine,” he says, which you’ll take as glowing praise. “Dave.”

“Yeah, man?”

“About earlier—”

You are cutting him off before he finishes the second word: “Dude can we please not talk about it.” You meant it, you’re not gonna fuck with talking anymore. You came here with food as an unspoken apology, and that’s gonna be it. No point talking about shit that ain’t gonna change. “Seriously, man, I’m—”

“Shut up for one goddamn moment, Dave.” You allow yourself to look at him, fully, (cause, honestly, in this situation it’d just be rude not to) and he’s frowning, and he’s not looking back at you, and one of his hands is scratching at the back of the other. You can almost feel it. Vicarious. Visceral. “I’m not going to fucking do that shit _again_ , neither of us want that, I just wanted to say—” He tightens his hand into a fist. “I’m sorry.”

You blink. “Uh, no problem, man.” He still isn’t looking at you. “Like really. So little of a problem that I’m gonna be honest and say I don’t really know what you’re apologizing for.”

You see him glance your way. You want to cover his hand with yours. “Obviously you fucking _do_ , you’re the one who stormed out.”

“Karkat, that wasn’t ‘storming’. Light fucking rain, at best.” You twirl the ramen around your fork, then drop it. “I meant it. It was getting a little crowded here, ‘s all. Wasn’t like I wasn’t gonna come back.” He claws a thread loose from the sheet, and doesn’t look at you. “You... knew I was gonna come back, right?”

He scoffs, and looks at you, finally. “Yes, Dave, I managed to piece together that you weren’t fucking off to never talk to me again after one bad conversation.” His nails dig into the bedspread. “But you were obviously leaving _in that moment_ because you were mad at me, because I’d pushed you on something you didn’t want to be pushed on, and insinuated you feel things that you don’t and, I thought, if someone is clearly fucking upset the decent thing to do is to apologize!”

You don’t want to read into his words, think about what he was thinking after you left, so you don’t. (And you’d probably hyperbolize it, anyway. He wasn’t lying around pining over you. Dude prolly just chilled and read. You aren’t the center of everybody’s world. Not his.) “I know, that’s what I was trying to do. With the food.”

He rolls his eyes. He’s let go of the bedspread, gone back to picking idly at his plate of food, and you’ll take that as progress. “For someone who seems fucking incapable of limiting his ramble bullshit, you’d think you’d manage to ever use your words.”

“I’m sorry, man.” You reach over the space between you and take his hand (not the grubsauce-covered one) in your own. The warm of his skin is— You just saw him this morning. Screw whatever crises you have about this shit, it simply can’t be healthy to have missed him this much. “I got a lot of— look, there’s just some things I’m not gonna talk about. Maybe that’s shitty. I don’t know, but this is one of those things I’m just not keen on going into, maybe ever. But it ain’t your fault that you responded to something I brought up, so, Karkat. I’m sorry.”

He shifts his hand back, just long enough for you to miss the contact, before he laces his fingers with yours. “We don’t have to talk about it,” he says. “This is just what it is.”

“Yeah.” You put your cup of ramen on the bedside table and shift closer to him. You press your other hand to his cheek. Your chest goes tight when he leans into it. “Fucking missed you, man.”

He laughs, more of a breath than anything real, but it’s nice to see him sans-frown. “It’s been half a _day_.” But he pushes his food to the side, too, and moves towards you till he’s practically in your lap.

“Twelve whole hours, dude. Wasting away like some shitty period romance character, lounging in the troll Russian countryside, waiting for—”

Your great fucking analogy is promptly cut off as he kisses you, slipping his hand into your hair and pressing your chests flush. You shut your eyes and lean into him, because this is good, it’s been twelve hours since you’ve seen him but you never kissed him this morning so you haven’t done that since yesterday, when you kissed him goodnight.

Which, you realize, you always do.

Y’all aren’t talking about it, so you don’t have to think about it, either.

It just is what it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> death of communication babey
> 
> thank you all so much for reading!! i think of this as a turning point chapter (as it is literally the middle of the fic) so im very excited to be putting it out there!! as always, i would love to hear your thoughts on these two and how theyre Dealing With It All.
> 
> have a lovely afternoon y'all<333


	4. Chapter 4

Y’all are in his room, as usual, watching one of his piece-of-shit movies, as usual. Or, you guess, he’s watching it. You’re half-asleep, sunglasses-on, and so goddamn predictable, so you, as usual, are watching him.

He’s leaning far as fuck forward, so much so that you’d wonder if the dude actually needs glasses, if this wasn’t just how he acts specifically when watching some bullshit rom-com. Like he’s gotta soak it all in. You’d roll your eyes if you had the energy. _As if_ he hasn’t seen this one a million times. Hell, if you’re not losing it, it’s familiar, so he’s already watched it at least once with you. But he’s studying it nonetheless. 

The light from the screen illuminates the high-points of his face, the curve of his hands as they grip tight onto his knees, all edge-of-his-seat as he is. The leading lady is delivering her romantic confession and, in the bright light, you can see him mouth the words along with her, perfectly. Generic beefy male lead pulls her in for a kiss, the crowd (when the fuck did they get in the middle of a crowd?) cheers, and Karkat, without an ounce of self-consciousness, smiles, wide and honest and beautiful.

You really don’t get how he does it.

You move closer to him, slip your arm around his shoulder like _you’re_ some generic male lead in a predictably-terrible romcom, and rest your head on his shoulder. He doesn’t spare you more than a half-second’s glance before looking back at the TV. Which, like, c’mon, dude. The couple is already smooching. What else is there to look at?

His hair brushes your face as you kiss the space behind his ear, the soft curve of his jaw, the skin of his neck. You put a hand on his chin, to turn his face just far enough that you can press a kiss to his cheek. He swats your hand away — “This is the fucking _denouement_ , Dave, the movie isn’t done. Pay attention.” — but he’s still smiling. 

With the hand that isn’t on his shoulder, tapping idly on the fabric, you reach below his shirt. “Sorry, man, busy paying attention to you.”

He tries to force down a laugh, but with your mouth on his neck, you can feel the vibration of the sound. “You’re not cute.”

“You are.”

He tenses, just a bit, hand freezing halfway raised to your face and you can see, out of the corner of your eye, him looking at you. Like he’s waiting for you to backtrack.

You don’t.

He doesn’t respond, either, which is chill. Makes it easier for you to kiss him, full on the mouth. Your eyes are still open, so you can see him roll his, before pressing a hand flat against your back and pulling you to him. You follow, closed-eyes and opened-mouth. It really is kinda fucked, how much you like this: the closeness and kissing and the feel of him against you, warm. Well, that much is explicable, you guess. Dude’s a furnace, and you’re always cold.

You decide you aren’t quite close enough, so you shift so that you’re in his lap, chest pressed to his. You cast a shadow over his face, blocking out the screenlight. He pulls away to glare at you, and you raise your eyebrows, questioning.

“This is flagrant disrespect of the film, Dave.”

You snort. “Man, you’ve seen this shit a million times, I’m claiming priority right now.”

“I see _you_ a million times a _day_ , you have no goddamn right to claim _shit_.”

You laugh against the skin of his cheek. “Sorry, babe, you got me all fired up with that deeply sexy troll rom-com, nothing to be done about it now.”

He furrows his brow, but doesn’t stop the gentle motion of his hand tracing down your spine. “Don’t call me that,” he says, and it takes you a second to catch his meaning.

“What, ‘babe’?” He squints when you say it, and you grin. “Yeah, nah, I get it. Too modern. You’re more into that period piece shit, right, darling?” 

He curls a hand around the back of your neck, trying and failing to look annoyed. “I don’t remember that many historical romance heroes being Earth Texan.”

“Nah, sweetheart, you just ain’t looking in the right place.” You’re having fun with this now. You run your hands over his sides, and those alien ridges jutting out from the skin over his ribs, and try to guess if it’s that or the pet names that are getting him all red in the face. “You go to any grocery store, you got a whole row of pictures of beefy shirtless dudes in cowboy hats all smoldering at the camera, promising a novel full of steamy all-American rodeo porn. People ate that shit up.”

“I’m already well aware that humans have an abysmal understanding of anything even _vaguely_ related to romance, so I’m in no way fucking surprised.”

“No accounting for taste, sugar,” you try. When it comes down to it, you don’t know all that many endearments, and you don’t really like the taste of them in your mouth, stilted and artificial and untrue. But you like the flush on his cheeks, the small quirk of his lips.

You like him.

“C’mon, angel, what about you?” you ask, the sound half-lost on the skin of his cheek. “Got nothing to call me? You’re telling me a culture that produced a fuckmillion blockbuster romantic comedies ain’t got pet names to call your whole harem of quadrant-lovers?”

He rolls his eyes, faux-casual, but his hand has stilled on your back, shoulders tight and half-raised. “Obviously it did.”

You’re not sure what to make of his sudden silence, but he’s still as close to a smile as he is wont to get, usually, so you press on. “I mean if you think I couldn’t pronounce it, you’d prolly be right — but I really don’t think I can be blamed for having like half the number of vocal cords y’all got. The fact that you can even speak English is kinda fucking impressive, dude, given how I’m pretty sure the species voicebox is more fit for like bug noises.” He seems to have relaxed, gone back to drawing circles over your back with his hand, looking at you eyebrows-raised and waiting for some sort of conclusion. “Not that that’s a bad thing. Bug alien voice? Kinda fucking sexy, man. It’s like, rough, ya know? I’m into it, personally.”

“Thanks for your gracious fucking approval.” You weren’t joking. There’s a sort of growl, a rough roll to his ‘r’s and, you mean, yeah. It is kinda hot. “Glad to know I have permission to speak for the sole purpose of your attraction!”

“Dude, as if you’d shut up, regardless of what I thought.” You tap him on the shoulder, like you don’t already got his attention. “So what are they? You know I’m all interested in getting multicultural.”

“You quite notably are not!” You shrug, but keep looking at him, eyebrows-raised and expectant. He _tsk_ s. You can see his teeth which, again, still damn attractive, even if they’re paired with him looking away from you. “Given the fact that we have a complex and superior romance system, all our fucking endearments correspond with those individual quadrants. Obviously.”

You nod. You ain’t keen on admitting it, but hearing him talk about it all the time, watching all these goddamn movies, you mean— It’s kinda hard not to be at least a _bit_ interested in it all. It’s definitely all just dramatized human types of relationships, you’re sure, but it’s cool that they did something with it. “Yeah, man, hit me with one.”

He looks at you, then, like he doesn’t get why you’d even say that. “For all you fetishize my fucking voice, you clearly don’t listen to a word I say! It’s— No, fuck, I can see you! You’re doing it again! I know it’s so goddamn alluring for you when I talk bullshit but please try to pay some basic fucking attention!” Honestly, the teeth were more distracting that go than the voice, but you still cotton on to him talking around something.

“Sorry, man, I really ain’t got the slightest hint what you’re talking about.”

He huffs. “The endearments are for _quadrants_. There are specific words used for what your shared quadrant is.” You blink. “So, _dumbass_ , there aren’t any endearments for us because we’re not in a fucking quadrant!”

“Oh.” You lean back for a second. And it shouldn’t really matter, cause you were using all types of dating words, and y’all aren’t— (you’re not going into _that_ again), but it sits weird with you. Cause it’s like— yeah, the quadrants are all tied up in alien romance, but it’s not _dating_ , not in the human sense, and y’all aren’t dating, definitely, but you mean you’re doing _something_ , right, and maybe it’s this, and maybe it wouldn’t be a thing if y’all— “But, dude, what if— I mean, we could be, if you—”

He tenses instantly, and you are pressed close enough to him that you can feel his discomfort, and it makes you stop short. He opens his mouth, then shuts it.

“Or not,” you continue, relaxing your shoulders which had, apparently, tensed at some point. “Sorry, man, uh—”

“It’s fine.” He says. His tone is clipped and short. You decided the moment you said it that that was a dumb idea, so you weren’t gonna push it anyway, but his reaction really settles it. Shutting up about that now. That’s not gonna be a thing. And for the best, really. 

(Your denial’s got legs but even those get tired.) 

He shakes his head, and continues: “We should go back to the room.” 

(Tired-ass denial aside, you can’t help but wonder when ‘his room’ became ‘the room’.)

“Sure thing dude.” That prolly means he wants you out of his lap. You go. “Rom-com marathons really take it out of you, huh? I’m down to get some shut-eye if you are, man.”

You extend a hand — some sort of shaky, calloused-fingered olive branch — and he takes it. You pull him up. He smiles, tight-lipped and head-tilted downward. “Let’s go, Dave.”

You walk back to the room.

You don’t let go of his hand.

* * *

You draw him sometimes.

Outside the realm of bullshit comics, you’re not a great artist, but you get how to draw a face. It never looks all that much like him, but he never asks what you’re doing on your tablet, so you never have to show anybody. ’sides, you like doing it.

Something productive, out of all the looking.

You’re trying to get the placement of his eyes right, the downward-cast gaze. His irises are near full-red now, and — barring the streaks of black — just a bit lighter than yours. You’ve never been particularly unhappy with your eye color (shades are just fucking cool, it ain’t about your eyes. If anything, it’s a hell of a lot easier to keep a straight face when half is covered), but something about the red-on-yellow against the grey-pink of his face is— It’s nice. That’s all.

You’re allowed to appreciate things like that.

Especially since it’s productive, now. You zoom in till you can see the pixels, and work in the detailing far more than is needed for such a small part of the drawing. You have to guess a bit about where the streaks of black are; the iris itself is covered by the fan of his eyelashes, since he’s looking down at his notebook. (He’s writing some romance novel, you think. Same rules apply, you don’t ask. But — though you aren’t super down with troll erotica — you’re kinda curious about it.) 

You look up from your tablet, and he’s looking back at you. Which, honestly kinda fucking up your drawing — you’re gonna have to completely start over with the new position — but you just gesture for him to say whatever’s on his mind. When he doesn’t, “What, dude?”

“Do you want to have sex?” he asks, and.

Uh.

You blink. He’s looking at you, still, not anxious at all and barely expectant, and your blush doesn’t show easily but damn you can feel your face getting hot. “Damn. Real fucking romantic, dude.” You laugh, a little, but it gets caught in your throat. “You plan that out?” 

He rolls his eyes and leans back into the cushions on the couch. “We don’t have to.”

“No, I.” The thing is, if you were thinking about this, you might have some fucking objections and worries about some fucking implications. But, _the thing is_ , you aren’t thinking about it, or talking about it, you’re just doing what you want and what he wants, and, honestly, that’s— “Yeah.”

He does that thing with his face that he does, where he’d be raising one eyebrow if that was a thing he was physically able to do. It’s dumb. It’s cute. “So am I supposed to take the ‘no’ part of that or the ‘yeah’?”

“The, the ‘yeah’ part. We should.” This is so fucking stupid. “Do that.” Then, since not thinking apparently has some fucking downsides: “Like now?”

He kicks you, lightly, in the shin. “No, asshole, it’s the middle of the fucking day.”

“I don’t know what you’re into, man.” You kick him back. “Besides, time’s always been a construct and now that we’re on a fucking meteor that shit ain’t even on the mind—”

“Shut up. Tonight?” 

That’s soon. That’s really fucking soon. “Can’t wait, huh?” You saddle up next to him, pressing your leg against his. “Sounds good, man. You want me to alchemize some candles? Get some chill music? Build a sense of ambiance? We wanna go for that deeply romantic troll erotica vibe?”

He scoffs, but he’s not quite successful in forcing down a smile. He shoves your shoulder, and immediately after grabs onto it to pull you in for a kiss. “Absolutely fucking not,” he answers. “Don’t be weird about this.”

“Keep it vanilla, I got it.”

“If you can manage to suppress your blatant teeth kink.”

“ _Dude_.”

You do alchemize the candle.

When he sees it, he goes from tight-shouldered and clearly fucking nervous to laughing, wide grin and his teeth glinting in the low light from the flame. You smile too. He takes the candle from your hand, fingers warm where they brush yours, and sets it on the table beside him. Raises the same hand to your face, waits for a moment with his thumb on the side of your glasses. Then, slowly, pulls them off of you. It’s dark in the room, so much that the loss of the shades barely does a thing.

You like seeing him without them.

He kisses you, then, hand on your face and body pressed to yours. You close your eyes. He kisses you, and keeps kissing you, and— 

It’s all fumbling, and both of y’all nervous and working through, too much of the very little knowledge between the two of you coming directly from highly-dramatized erotica, but you’ve had some time, now, to get to know what you like, and what he likes, and how y’all work together. It ain’t hard to transfer that to this. Besides, he keeps kissing you.

It’s good.

And yeah, well, you know you’re not objective. But, still. You think it’s really good.

You’re not thinking. You are.

It’s quiet, in the room. He’s lying half on top of you, not quite sleeping. Y’all’s hands are clasped tight. You study the grey-red expanse of his back and, with the fingers that are not interwoven with his, you trace lines to connect the freckles speckling his shoulder blades. He turns his head, looks at you. With a soft, half-smile, he raises y’all’s hands to his lips, and kisses your knuckles. You laugh, quiet. Your breathing and his are almost in sync.

You watch him, as he settles your hands back on your chest. Light from the nearly burned-down candle catches the bridge of his nose, lingers in his hair, defines the curve of his shoulder. He is still and candlelit and so goddamn beautiful, and you think, you could just look at him, forever. You think, it doesn’t matter if nobody else ever wants anything to do with you, if you have this. You think, you’re never gonna stop. You think— 

“I think I love you.”

His shoulders stiffen the moment you say it, his breathing falters, and falls out of sync with yours. In the light, you just catch the moment he goes eyes-wide and smile-dropped, before he looks away. When he looks back, a second later, he has a facsimile of his not-quite-grinning, amused expression, but it isn’t right. You know the real one well enough by now.

Your chest is tight.

He scoffs. Doesn’t-quite-raise-his-eyebrow. Like earlier, like you said something dumb, that he can brush off, that you can brush off. “You’re a fucking cliche.” He lets go of your hand, raises it to flick the side of your head. “ _I_ think you just had sex for the first time, and it addled your brain.”

Oh.

Oh. Yeah, no. That’s probably.

Yeah. That’s it.

You nudge him with the shoulder that’s trapped beneath his torso, and do your best to grin. “‘For the first time’? You don’t think I’ve gotten around, dude? You think my skills came from nowhere?”

He rolls his eyes, but the tight expression is gone. He’s glad you’re dropping it. (You’re glad you’re dropping it. Yeah.) “No, I think your ‘skills’ came from my grand fucking collection of romantic media which, to your credit, apparently you paid far more attention to than I’d thought!”

“Karkat, man, you think I don’t engage with your interests? Don’t willingly take notes on your bizarre alien porn?”

“Replace ‘bizarre’ with ‘classy.’” He presses his hand to the side of your face. You lean into it, but not too much. (There are, apparently, limits. Of what he’s okay with.) “This was good.”

“High fucking praise,” you cut in. “Man, can’t wait to tell people I was ‘good’.”

Using the same hand, he hits you lightly on the same cheek. But ‘hit’ isn’t the right word, really. It reminds you more of that thing they do in his movies, sometimes, to calm folks down or give some reassurance. As part of the alien platonic romance. (You don’t know how to unpack that, so you don’t.) “Shut up, take the fucking compliment.” Then, looking down, “Would you ever want to do this again?”

You’re trying not to think about it because, clearly, that only leads to dumb bullshit, as fucking seen again, but if anything that lends more credence to the conclusion you’ve made, which is that, obviously, sex makes you a sentimental dumbass, saying shit that ain’t true to someone who doesn’t want to hear it. You think, you prolly shouldn’t do it again.

But you’re doing what you want.

“Yeah, dude.” You kiss him, a moment of firm pressure, and don’t turn it gentle. “Any time.”

* * *

So, it isn’t the only time you sleep with him. It is the only time you say that.

Probably means he was right, about the addled brain thing.

Yeah, no, you don’t… 

Yeah.

Obviously, you don’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy.
> 
> yeah no some notes about dave and denial: the way I write dave is really as someone who thinks a lot but only lets himself consciously think certain things (which is what we see in his narration). so, a lot of emotions end up really bottled, which ends with him occassionally dramatically and arbitrarily expressing an Emotion (as seen pretty much once per chapter from 2-4). the way I'm intending it, these outbursts kind of walk the line of funny and sad like, it is the height of teen angst to punch a wall or tell someone you love them immediately after sex. karkat often calls him out for these things, points out the drama and cliche. but dave just is Not doing well enough, emotionally, to process his emotions in a way that would allow him to Not do that. the fact that he has Any emotional honesty, even when its in these spikes of feelings, is probably a good thing?
> 
> (none of this is to say that karkat doesn't also have issues. he does. hopefully that's Very clear)
> 
> i need to shut the fuck up but point is. were careening fast to the ending which I have Not written yet but I know Precisely what will happen. boy oh man. sorry that this is a Tad late, and that I've been shit responding to comments, I was without a computer for a bit, and I hate doing ao3 stuff on mobile. but I am back now and I love hearing from yall so dang much!!
> 
> good afternoon yall <333


	5. Chapter 5

You wake to the sound of someone knocking on the door.

You wince — you definitely didn’t get your full eight hours — and get ready to bitch at him for locking himself out of the room in the middle of the goddamn night, apparently, but— nope. As you get an ounce more consciousness, you can tell: he’s in bed, half beneath you, arm cast loosely around your shoulders. Which, yeah, that’s nice. But it means you ain’t got a clue who’s at the door.

“Dude,” you whisper, shoving at his arm. He groans and, without opening his eyes, pushes your face away from him. “Karkat, man, there’s someone at the door and that’s _your_ door, bro, I’m not gonna fucking open it.”

He cracks an eye open, and looks to the opposite side of the room, like he’s just now hearing the ever-louder knocking. “Someone’s here?”

“Yeah, dude.” You think the tired is mostly cancelling out the worry, but that’s beginning to catch up, your heart getting a little loud in your chest and— “Got anywhere I can hide?”

You don’t see his face when you ask cause he — literally — rolls out of a bed, and collapses with a huff on the ground. He stands and dusts himself off. “Stay under the covers, dumbass. Going anywhere else will make a fuckton of noise.” To the door, he turns and yells, “I’m coming, give me one fucking second!”

You wince back from the noise but, before he can fully turn away, you grab his wrist. He looks at you, eyebrow half-raised, and you pull him down to kiss you. (It feels, inexplicably, very important that you do.) When he moves away, his eyebrows are furrowed, but he’s smiling, too. You roll your eyes, almost-smile, and pull the big ass quilt over your head. 

It’s stuffy as shit under the blanket, and you try to slow your breathing. It’s not any sort of disguise, you completely get that, but it ain’t like you had choices. With him blocking the door, and the bulk of the quilt, if somebody ain’t paying attention, it should be stealthy enough. Terezi, or Kanaya, or even the fucking clown, as long as they’re not trying to find you specifically— 

“Good afternoon, Karkat. I’m looking for my brother.”

Well, fuck. 

At least she sounds sober. 

Karkat, to his credit, doesn’t falter. “Have you checked his fucking block?”

“Yes, actually. Three times in the past three days. And I’ve sent him a fair number of messages—” You really can’t be blamed for letting your phone die, when you’re constantly around the only person who talks to you, and you turned off pesterchum notifications on your computer ages ago. Better than listening for the rare-ass message. “I’m beginning to worry he’s found some sort of heroic or just misadventure and we haven’t stumbled upon his corpse yet.”

“He’s fine, I saw him yesterday,” Karkat answers, and dude’s surprisingly good at this. Ain’t even a lie.

“Hmm. And he isn’t here?”

“No.”

“Then I have to offer you my congratulations, Karkat, with the success you’ve found with one of your exes. It is one of them who’s under the quilt, then?” You knew this was a shit place to hide. “I wouldn’t have taken Terezi or Gamzee as inclined towards aviators, but I figure those aren’t _your_ glasses on the bedside table.” Scratch any relief at her sobriety, drunk Rose would be _far fucking preferable_ , in this situation. “And the numerous scattered juice bottles, that I would presume—”

“God damn, Rose,” you say, rolling out from under the quilt. You push on your glasses and stand in the same motion, walking barefoot to stand next to Karkat. He shuffles, just slightly, to the side. “Great detective work. What do you want?”

She raises one of her well-kept eyebrows. Actually, everything about her is pretty well-kept, seeing as last time you saw her (what, two weeks ago? Gotta be less than that, right?) she was notably less than composed. “Good to see you alive.” She looks you over, sparing the occasional glance at Karkat, and you can see her studying the pieces she’s put together, like she wasn’t quite sure they fit, but some light’s been shed and she’s seeing that whole jigsawed picture now.

She’s seeing it wrong, of course. But you don’t know how to say that.

“Can I talk to you, Dave?” She says, finally looking you in the face again, already half-turned out into the hall.

You think, if this were one of Karkat’s dumbass movies, you’d shift closer to him and you would, with squared shoulders and chin-tilted-up, say that anything she wants to say, she can say in front of him, and he’d look at you with those wide eyes and upturned eyebrows and he’d just barely be smiling, and Rose would falter and she’d get it, that you and he were… 

Whatever.

Operating on a false premise.

As it is, you shrug, arms crossed over your chest and shoulders tense, not quite meeting her eye. “Yeah, sure.” You don’t say goodbye to him. Cause why should you? You’ll be gone thirty minutes, tops, and it’s not like you owe him that. You look at him, though.

Like always.

He looks… 

No, fuck that. It doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t.

Rose turns, watching your and his eye contact, eyebrows raised, so you just turn and shoulder past her. “Not a word,” you mutter, and continue out into the hall. 

You walk a bit ahead, and you can feel her eyes on you. Thinking. You’ve always been able to tell when she’s doing her psychoanalysis thing, and she’s sure as fuck doing it. And you can guess what about.

You didn’t fall asleep in one of his shirts, luckily, but now that she’s here, now that you’re visible for the first time in ages, you can’t help but see how much you wear him. You’re wearing him in the marks on your neck and the scratches on your arms, in your affectations and speech patterns, shit you couldn’t help but pick up after so much time with no one but him. You’re so goddamn obvious.

Whatever. Whatever.

“So?” you ask, turning and leaning against the wall of a neighboring room. Arms crossed. She looks you over before walking a bit further in, eventually seating herself on the dilapidated couch. A cloud of dust puffs up. You raise your eyebrows. She raises her eyebrows. After a second, you huff, push off the wall, and walk to sit on the chair across from her. You question her with a shrug.

“You’re upset with me,” she responds, in lieu of an answer. Which, you guess, is the lesser of the two uncomfortable-ass topics she could be bringing up right now.

You scrub a hand over your face. “Look, Rose, it ain’t a whole deal. You woke me up in the middle of the night, I’d barely gotten a blink of sleep before you dragged me out into a cold-ass meteor and now you’re asking me to talk emotions when I’m not even sure that part of my brain is on yet. Sorry if I ain’t the most fucking receptive.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Not night.” She’s settling on semantics, then. “It is three in the afternoon.”

“As the resident time guy, I say it’s all a construct, and that people make their own damn internal clocks when everybody else is hiding in on themselves and not making the time to come around.”

She leans forward, chin rested on her hand, full therapist pose. “Not upset?”

“Nope.” Talking to her used to be easy, you think. It’s not the usual reason you stop thinking things, but you sure as shit stop thinking it. “What did you want to talk about?”

“Not everything has to be a federal fucking issue, Dave. We can just have a conversation.” You look at her. Don’t respond. “I figure we’re about due for one. I haven’t seen you in well over a week, and I don’t think we’ve had a conversation in, what, a month? Longer since we’ve had one of any value.” 

_Cause you’ve been drunk_ , thinks something in you, mean and unfair. You dig your fingernails into your crossed arms and don’t say it. “Ain’t been much to talk about. It’s a meteor, Rose, shit’s not in flux.”

She gives you an incredulous look, halfway to smug in her surety. “Well, _something_ is new here.”

Oh.

You tighten your grip on your biceps. “Nothing to say about that.”

“Isn’t there?” You shut your eyes. “I don’t intend to push you, Dave, but I did want to offer my congratulations. I would have brought champagne, if I’d known.” 

You scoff. You can’t help it. “Jesus, Rose.”

“Is that an inappropriate reaction?” You’re not looking at her, you can’t see any sincerity or lack thereof, and you don’t want to. “I am happy for you, honestly, though I do wish you’d told me. We could’ve talked about—”

“There was nothing to talk about. There _is_ nothing to talk about. It’s not…”

Some of the smug assurance painting her expression melts away, but she is still eyebrow-raised, head-tilted. “Are the two of you not—”

“Can we talk about you?” you interrupt. “What’re you up to, Rose? How’s shit in the Lalonde-Maryam household?”

You catch the momentary furrow of her brow. “This is avoidance, I’m sure you’re aware.”

“Nah, but that sure seems to be.” You lean forward. You realize, quickly, that you’re mirroring her pose. “I mean, given that it’s three in the afternoon, apparently, I prolly shouldn’t’ve expected you to be all tipsy, but I’ve seen you more out of it earlier in the day. How’s the whole— that thing. Going.”

She purses her lips. She wants to push you on the Karkat topic, obviously, but you can’t tell if it’s cause she’s being nosy or avoidant. Don’t matter, really. You’re not gonna talk about it, whatever her reason. “I did want to speak with you about that, actually,” she eventually says. “I… believe that the drinking might be becoming an issue.”

“I don’t think it’s just now becoming one, Rose.” You try to keep your voice soft, really not trying to be a dick about this, but there is a resentment there that you can’t shake off. Probably says something about you. Too bad you’re not listening. “So, what, are you done?”

“No,” she says, plainly. Leaning back, out of therapist pose, she continues, “It isn’t simple as that. The withdrawal symptoms of going cold turkey would be what they would, and besides, I just don’t—” She shuts her eyes. Her head is turned at a perpendicular angle to yours, a full refusal of eye contact. “It isn’t as simple as stopping.”

“I know.” You don’t. You don’t _get_ this thing, and you never have. Ignoring it worked just fine, so well that eventually Rose started ignoring you. “I’m definitely being simplistic as shit about this but, I mean, can’t you try?”

“Difficult, when I often don’t want to.” She smiles, sharply, the expression in shadow, her profile turned from the light. “This is a part of the reason I wanted to talk to you. I’m not expecting you to fix this for me, obviously, but trying to manage this all on my own doesn’t help.”

“‘On your own’? Thought Kanaya would be all for helping with...” It takes your brain a second to catch up with the tightness in her expression, and to try to piece together, in all your recent sightings of Rose and Kanaya, when the last time you saw them together. Your stomach tightens in parallel. “You… you didn’t break up. You and Kanaya. You two are good, right?”

The hand supporting her chin tightens to a fist, pressing against her face. She doesn’t look at you. Something in you feels sick and wrong and tight with a worry you had no way of knowing you had. “She and I are still together.” Some of the bad feeling recedes, but the vague wording sure doesn’t help shoo it away. “It’s just... difficult to talk about this with her. She wants to help, I understand that. But I can tell…” She takes a breath that catches in her throat. “She is disappointed in me. Constantly. I am just waiting to see how long her concern will outweigh her disappointment, before...” She uncurls her fist into splayed fingers, a wordless demonstration of the inevitability.

“Rose,” you say, and then nothing else, for a moment. “She isn’t gonna break up with you. You know this, she fucking loves you.” Rose makes an unconvinced sound. “No, no, look. Y’all have this figured out. You figured it out months ago. She started dating you when you were drunk as shit, so it doesn’t— _clearly_ she cares about you enough that that doesn’t matter, that isn’t gonna _change_ , just cause you fuck up a bit doesn’t mean she’s gonna stop caring about you.”

She catches something in your tone — she’s always been better at reading you than is at all fucking fair — and turns to look at you. “Are you alright, Dave?”

“Yeah.” You make sure your voice doesn’t waver. “Yeah, obviously, are you? You and her— you’re solid. You’re good. Even if she’s disappointed, she ain’t gonna leave while you’re working through your problems, she’s gonna stay and once you work it all out, you’re good like always. Y’all will be— fine. You will.”

She hesitates before speaking, eyes narrowed like she’s gonna read into something that ain’t even on the page. “Is this about your own relationship?”

“I don’t— _have_ a relationship, holy shit. That’s not. This isn’t even about that, look.” It isn’t. It, honestly, isn’t. Admittedly, the truth ain’t much better, and you really don’t have the time to unpack this vicarious stability you apparently placed on your sister’s alien romance. (Stability that, huh, _apparently_ isn’t a goddamn stable as you thought.) “It’s about, you and Kanaya got something real and solid and fucking _honest_ , and you’re not gonna lose that. You two are going to be fine.” 

She’s still looking at you. Eyebrows all furrowed and curious and she’s looking at you, and she and Kanaya are on the rocks, and she thinks you and Karkat are on the rocks, when y’all aren’t even on any sort of boat to get snagged, and— “I’m not dating him.”

She blinks. If the out-of-left-field surprises her, she doesn’t show it. “You’re… not.”

“Look, I know what you saw and I ain’t gonna try to deny that, like obviously I’m in the dude’s bed something’s going on, but. Me and him. We aren’t— It’s a casual thing, not a whole relationship.” Sure, you live with him and sleep with him and say dumb shit sometimes, but that doesn’t mean— _Jesus_. Who the fuck do you think you’re fooling? “It ain’t like you and Kanaya. We’re not. Like that.”

She starts to lean forward again. “Like what, precisely?”

“Like— _romantic_. We don’t go on dates or say sappy shit, none of it means anything, I’m not— I’m not _in love_ with him.”

“I never said you were.” In the moment she’s quiet, you notice your raised shoulders, clenched fists. You relax. Hope the moment wasn’t long enough she cottoned on, too. “When I offered you my congratulations, it wasn’t just for securing what I assumed was a boyfriend.” You flinch back into the tight-shoulders, just a bit. “You’ve been quite avoidant, nevermind all the freudian slips and so-called ‘ironic’ displays of homosexuality, so coming to terms—”

“Jesus.” You steady your voice, like your heart hasn’t taken the express elevator up to chill in your throat. “Holy shit Rose it ain’t—” You shake your head and bark out a vocal cord-scraping laugh. “Look, you wanted to know why I didn’t tell you? Cause of this, precisely. Watching you show up at that door was like watching you step into some jumping boots cause I _knew_ you were gonna leap to all sorts of fucking conclusions—”

She raises that same fucking eyebrow, leaned casually like this is one of your old bullshit, _call out Dave for being—_ (fuck, whatever), those old back-and-forths, kids joking about stuff that didn’t matter and definitely wasn’t any sort of goddamn smokescreen— “I think any and all conclusions reached could have been stepped to in heels, no leaping required.”

You shake your head, a quick, stilted motion. “You don’t— you don’t _get_ to act smug about this, act like this proves anything. It doesn’t.” You find that you’re standing, and now she’s looking at you like y’all ain’t joking around anymore. “This is the fucking _definition_ of ‘extenuating circumstances’.

“Like fuck,” you throw your hands up. “ _Sure_ , if we’re looking at this in a vacuum I get how it looks, but last I checked, this space-void? Vacuum free. In context, it doesn’t say _shit_ about me that I ended up in a complicated relationship with the only fucking person who willing to give me more than five minutes of his time for _weeks_.”

“Dave.”

“It’s just.” Your hands are crossed over your chest, and you’re pacing, and the heart in your throat is blocking all the airflow except for short, tight breaths. “It’s bullshit loneliness, it’s not anything real, I’m not— I’m not _like_ you.”

She doesn’t say anything until you meet her eyes. “Now what does _that_ mean?”

“It means that, that I’m not like you, not like him, or your alien girlfriend, or everyone on this fucking meteor, _apparently_ , because, cause unlike all of you I’m not—” You don’t know if it’s your heart or another organ or some other shit that’s made a fucking homestead in your throat, but something has cause you _should_ be able to say this one fucking word, you know you physically _can_ but it just won’t— “I’m _not_ —” You run your hands through your hair and try, try to say it but you can’t and you can’t and you can’t. “ _Fuck!_ ” 

You collapse back on your chair. Your arms are crossed over your chest, but it doesn’t make it any warmer. You’re still breathing too-fast and too-loud, and you’re so obvious, and visible, but what does it even matter? She’s always fucking known.

You scrub a hand over your face. It doesn’t come away wet, so, points for not being such a bitch you start to fucking cry. “That’s not… that ain’t the point.” You take another moment to catch your breath. “You and Kanaya, you were actually into each other, and chose to date each other, and that’s— great for you, Rose, genuinely, like a real kinda genuine that scared the shit outta me thinking she was gonna break up with you— but this isn’t a one-to-one thing. You-and-her to me-and-him. Like, I like the dude, he’s my friend, but it isn’t like it was with y’all. It wasn’t a choice. I didn’t look at my options and pick him out, he was the only person there. I didn’t _choose_ for everyone else to fuck off.”

“Dave.” If she calls you on it, you’re gonna leave. Fuck off, and stay fucked off. You’ve done just fine essentially without her for a couple of months, you can stand however many more until you get to the new session. “I’m not going to press you on this, and I apologize if I was doing so before, but I don’t think it’s fair of you to lash out at me for not being around when you weren’t any more so.”

“I ain’t— dammit, I’m not _‘lashing out’_. I’m just saying, if we’re talking about _fair_ , it ain’t fair of _you_ to not check in for months at a time and, when you show back up, start drawing conclusions about something you don’t understand—” Even if her conclusions about you had any merit — even if — she still wouldn’t know shit about what you and he have. “—cause you haven’t found the time to come around and ask, and when you do it’s not to talk to me, it’s just cause you want my _help_.”

For the first time in a bit, she winces, her face responding faster than she can stop it. “That was... deflection. That isn’t honestly why I went looking for you, I was downplaying, like we always—” She falters, clearly wanting you to take over. You don’t. “I, I miss you, Dave.” She, subtly, shakes her head. “I thought that was clear.”

“Not really.” She’s looking at you. Your mouth is dry. “I—” The words are there. This thing in your throat stopping you from talking, this one you can name. Resentment’s a bitch. “Yeah.”

She looks away, eventually. Her hands tighten around the hem of her skirt, and she smiles that same sharp thing as before. “This did not go as I intended.”

You laugh and feel, for the first time in this piece of shit conversation, like you might just cry. “Yeah, no, don’t think so.” You stand. “I’m gonna go. Gonna, uh, break up with him.” She looks up at you, a quick jerk of a motion. “I mean— _end things_ with him. Ain’t anything to break up.”

“What?” she asks, incredulous. Her eyebrows are all furrowed, and she gives a half-shake of the head, like you’re being ridiculous.

“Thought it out in that awkward-ass pause, and I’m realizing, all those conclusions you’re making, congrats, they’re good conclusions, so I should prolly. Stop doing what I’m doing.”

She pushes up to stand. You think she’s gotten taller. “Don’t end your relationship on _my_ behalf. If you want me to forget what I saw, fine, but don’t make yourself miserable and then resent me for it.”

You shake your head. “It ain’t about you, Rose. Really. I’m seeing it now and, like, the start and end of this was to keep me and him from going crazy with loneliness, and at some point it all spiraled a little out of hand, sure, but at the core of it, it never meant shit. Ending it won’t be a thing.” You’re nearly out the door, still facing her, but you don’t take the last step. You can’t leave like that. “I’ll see you later, okay? Gonna— charge my phone, if you want to text me. I’ll be around.”

“Don’t break up with him,” she says. Either she finally grew that inch and a half to be taller than you, or it really feels like she did. “Honestly, Dave.”

Your hand tightens on the doorframe. “I don’t think I got a choice,” you say.

And you leave.

* * *

The door is still open when you get back to his room. He’s in your line of sight, sitting at the foot of the bed, gaze far, mouth pressed into a line. Knees tucked against his chest. He doesn’t look over when you approach the room, even though you’re making no efforts to soften your step, and you know he hears well. 

You linger in the doorway for a moment. Considering. You know exactly how you should do it: shades-on, flat expression, ‘sorry, man, gotta put a stop on all the macking, but it’s all good, not like this meant anything to anybody’. Stay by the door. Leave immediately.

Like hell.

You cross the room, hands-in-pockets, and sit lightly down on the other end on the mattress. You clear your throat. He still doesn’t look at you. “Damn, we really don’t know shit about stealth, huh?” you say, forcing your face into a grin, in case he can see in his periphery. You hope it doesn’t appear the pulled-edges, uncanny-valley you’re pretty sure it does. “Like, doing some covert shit and we don’t even make a plan for somebody visiting, literally don’t even have a fucking _hiding_ spot like, that’s _comically_ unprepared—”

“Dave.”

“—it’s cool, though, cause we just gotta put a little more thought into it, do some real, Hollywood-approved actor shit, maybe start by separating out our wardrobes, like goddamn that’s the most basic —”

“ _Dave_.”

“And I know what you’re thinking, ‘meowbeast’s already out of the clothsack, what does it matter?’, but I told Rose I was ending shit with you and, yeah, she’ll prolly be a bit more around, if she’s serious about missing me, but it ain’t like she’ll be checking in all the time, so we can just get some basic sneak plans in place and we can keep going like—”

“DAVE.”

You meet his gaze, and immediately look the fuck away. You noticed, though. The shiny, translucent pink sheen over his eyes, sclera turned more orange than yellow, and for all he is curled-fists and furrowed-brow, he’s so clearly as hurt as he is angry, and you want him to be neither. He _shouldn’t_ be. You got— you know how to _fix_ this.

“I just meant— meant that we could keep this up. Thought that’s what you wanted, man.”

He makes a sound almost like a laugh, and shakes his head, disbelieving. “You think I _want_ this?” 

You force a shrug. You go to speak immediately, work through a tightness in your throat (because of _course_ he wants this, he has this whole time, he isn’t going to stop, or leave, he _won’t_ ), then respond, “Dude, you’ve never complained before.”

“Sorry for not complaining every time you’ve pulled some bullshit!” He is fully turned to you, leaning in close enough that the finger he’s pointing at you nearly pokes you in the chest. “And the thing is, _before_ , I was able to delude myself into thinking you wouldn’t be fucking _terrified_ of being seen with me! Before, I’d never had to fucking cover for you, or, or listen to you ask me where you had to fucking _hide_ , or—” He growls and buries his face in his hands. When he raises his head, his face is smudged with pink. “But that’s my own goddamn fault, isn’t it? because I didn’t manage to put together how clearly fucking ashamed you are of me!”

It’s too much. He’s too fucking much. You shake your head. “Karkat, man, calm down. It ain’t about that, you know this.”

He sneers, and some of the tears shed, fall over the wrinkles of his scrunched-up, pissed-off face. “Oh, fucking _do_ I? Please tell me more about what I apparently am so goddamn knowledgeable, Dave, because from where I’ve been standing, it looks a lot like it is exactly ‘about that’! But no, if it’s not, please tell me, what the fuck _is_ it about?”

How many times are you going to have to explain this today? “It’s about— the guy thing, dude, I’ve said this. Look, I’m sorry you didn’t expect me to be cagey, but I have _said_ this is a covert thing, from day one, cause I know what Rose is like and I _knew_ she would draw all sorts of bullshit conclusions if she found out. And now she is, and I don’t want to give her reasons to draw any more, but long as we stay low-key, it’s good. Nothing’s changed, dude. I don’t fucking like guys, but I never did. But that hasn’t been an issue before, I don’t know why it would be now.”

He scoffs, unbelieving, and gestures so wildly his hand nearly knocks over a bottle placed precariously on a bedpost. “Holy shit, Dave, sorry to blow your thinkpan wide fucking open here, but it has _always been an issue_! Maybe I’m an idiot, or maybe I give you too much goddamn credit, but I thought that, _eventually_ , at some point in your fucking _relationship with a guy_ , you might move past this weird repressed human bullshit you have going on, that I can see through, and I _know_ you see through. Or, if moving past it is too fucking difficult, I assumed that, at least, you’d be able to admit this thing that is so obvious that _literally everyone already knows_!”

Oh.

You don’t blink. Your expression doesn’t falter. Your hands are shaking, but you don’t tighten them into fists, cause he’d notice that a hell of a lot faster than the hand tremors. You don’t say anything. Not cause you can’t. Not cause your throat feels tight, not cause it feels like it did when talking to Rose, like you got a hair tie wrapped three times around your larynx and any words you’d try to say would get caught at the closed-off junction. Not like that. 

You just don’t have anything to say.

He meets your eye and his expression softens instantly. He drops the hand pointing accusingly at you, his lips part in a sympathetic downturn, and his eyes widen just enough that the remaining tears slip down his already red, blotchy face. He looks like a mess. A fucking overdramatic mess, and, Jesus fuck, why does he have to be so emotional about shit? Like really, the fucking tears? Why can’t he just be pissed at you, so you could be pissed right back, and no one would need to be crying and bringing all these goddamn emotions in where they weren’t fucking invited?

You feel his hands wrap around yours. You would pull back — should pull back, probably — but if he managed to take your hand he’s already noticed the shaking, so there ain’t any real point in trying to hide it. His thumbs brush gently over your knuckles. “Shit, Dave, that, that wasn’t fair. I know I don’t really get it — although, honestly, it’s not like I _could_ , given that you won’t ever fucking explain it to me, but — The point is, I know this is really difficult for you.” You should say, it isn’t, it isn’t difficult, cause it isn’t a _thing_ that’s _happening_ , but you still can’t talk and, besides, you… 

You are so goddamn tired. 

He’s still talking. “But, the thing is, it’s also really fucking difficult for _me_ — and I know that’s shitty, and, and selfish, but you have to get, Dave, that I’m looking at this, and I don’t understand why it’s an issue, even though clearly it is, because you won’t tell me why, so I’m just looking at this and thinking, there’s so clearly a fucking answer, _right goddamn there_ , that would make everything stop being so difficult, for both of us, but you just won’t _do_ it, so then half the time I think you’re just fucking with me, or that you don’t _care_ that this fucking _sucks_ —”

“I do.” You manage to say. “I care about that, dude, and I’m not, I’m not fucking with you. I wouldn’t. I don’t— want you to think I am, cause this is— cause I care about, you, I just.” You are breathing too loud. You can hear every tight exhale. “I just can’t say—” You can’t. You should be able to. There’s no reason why it should be physically impossible, but goddammit, you can’t. And you wonder, if you unwound that silly band wrapped around your throat, what shape it would be.

You don’t think they made them in the shape of closets, but ‘cognitive dissonance’ would be a lot harder to emulate in a shitty plastic loop.

“Yeah,” he says. His hands have moved to holding your wrists, thumbs tracing over the barely-visible lines of blue beneath your skin. You had to explain to him once, that it looked like that even though your blood was red, and you think that kinda confused him, too. He has a thing about his blood. A whole emotional issue thing. You think it’s probably on the same level for him as this thing is for you, maybe more, but at least it ain’t the kind of thing that leads him to pull people into unfulfilling, half-baked relationships that he is unable to fix. 

You.

You are unable to fix this.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. You know this, that you fucked this up from the moment you started it, built it on pillars of sand and repressed bullshit, because it was never supposed to be something that existed enough to be breakable, but it suddenly fucking is, and it is broken and you can’t fix it and he is going to leave, and you don’t know what to do.

You want to yell at him again. You want to say that dumb thing you said the first time you slept with him. You want to throw up, and you want him to take care of you. You want to do some stupid rom-com shit, stand out of his meteor window with a boom-box held over your head, wordlessly prove a point you can’t figure out how to say in words.

You just want him to stay.

You kiss him, instead. For as fucked in the head as you are right now, you know what’s too fucking dramatic, and what would be too much, even for him. Besides, you know where this is going, you know where this conversation ends and what ends with it, and you need— 

So, you kiss him. You lean into too-quick and too-awkward, your hands in parallel holding tightly on either side of his face, knees knocking in the space between you. For a moment, he is still, not doing anything, like you’re already too late, and it’s just enough time for your chest to get all tight with panic—

He kisses back.

He takes your chin in his hand, pushes you away, just slightly, just enough to reshape this rushed, desperate plea of a kiss into a gentle kindness. You know trolls have some sort of kink for pity, that it’s, in many ways, love for them, and you know that the word isn’t the insult you hear every time one character says it to another. You know that, and still a part of you can’t stand that this is the most lovingly he’s ever kissed you. You can’t stand knowing exactly why.

He slows the kiss to nearly a stop, breaks for an inch of space, and then kisses you one more time, before pulling away and pressing his lips to your forehead. You lean back into him, not quite ready to let go, but turns his face from you. Unwilling to meet your eyes.

Shit. Shit.

God _dammit_.

You clear your throat, for your sake more than his. “So was, uh, that was the end of it, huh?” It’s a question far more than it is a statement. You ask it, make it obvious that if he still wants to, even if it’s the vaguest preference, he knows you’ll stay. You won’t be pissed if he agrees, you’ll get it, you know better than anyone that he deserves way fucking better than what you’re capable of giving, but if he wants to stay— 

He rests his head on top of yours. “Yeah, I think so.”

Yeah.

Yeah, of course. 

You feel pathetic, and you feel stupid, but you ask, “Can I stay here a bit?”

He shifts back, and it’s cool, you remind yourself, if he needs space. Needs time alone. Cause if y’all aren’t, if y’all aren’t doing this thing anymore, then you’re just friends. If that. Nah, you’re just people who keep each other company cause they ain’t got anybody else, and you definitely aren’t people who would spend days at a time in each other’s rooms. It’s fine, if he needs the distance, it’s cool—

He presses his hands to your face.

His fingers are feather-light as they brush over your cheeks, and he is close enough that you can feel his breath. You lean into the touch. “I’m not kicking you out of my block,” he promises, with a half-smile, an implicit promise, a _you don’t even need to ask_. “Obviously.”

“Cool,” you manage.

“Cool,” he echoes, voice soft and teasing you. His fingers run through in the hair curling around your ear, pinky resting on the curve of your jaw. His gaze flits over your face. You want him to kiss you, you want to know why the fuck he’s doing this — holding you, hovering inches away — when he’s already said he isn’t gonna do that, but whatever kinda person you’d need to be to tell him to stop, you’re not it. Instead, when he loosely hooks his fingers over the temples of your glasses, you just give him nodded permission. Of course. His fingertips brush the skin around your eyes as he pulls them off, and you miss the warmth of his proximity as he leans back, folding the glasses in his hands, before setting them to the side.

And he looks at you.

It’s not a big deal, really. He’s seen you without shades plenty of times, of course, before sleep and after showers and, obviously, sex, even though you tried insisting on keeping them on once, just to hear him bitch at you, but he didn’t, he just asked if you were serious— not mocking, just saying it would be fine if you were, cause he always makes such a big fucking deal about you being comfortable and happy and, holy shit, what if no one ever treats you like this again? What if this is your only chance at someone caring about you this much and you’ve fucking _ruined_ —

His hands are back on your face, he is softly _shush_ ing you, thumbs wiping at the skin beneath your eyes. It’s his weird platonic romance thing again, you think, and you think, what the fuck is up with that?, then think, oh fuck, you’re crying, aren’t you?

You pull away, wipe fruitlessly at any lingering tears, and laugh something that sounds more watery than amused. “Damn, dude, you’ve seen me without glasses plenty, it ain’t some big thing,” you say, like you’re not the only one crying. Bullshit. What kind of overemotional _bullshit—_

His hands are back in his lap, curled into each other, and he took it as a rejection of his comfort, you realize, when you pulled away from him. It wasn’t. It really fucking wasn’t. But what the fuck are you gonna do, ask him to hold your face again? Grab his hand with yours and press it to your own goddamn cheek? Jesus. Only thing more pathetic than that would be throwing yourself directly into his arms. Which would just—

Yeah, yeah no, you’re hugging him.

Your hands grasp at the back of his sweater, your bit-down, uneven fingernails snagging the wool fibers, and it triggers that same sort of visceral discomfort as hearing nails on glass or the scrape of blade-on-blade. You don’t let go. You bury your face in his shoulder, your chest and his flush, and you are sat half in his lap and half out of it, and you still don’t feel close enough. His torso moves yours as he breathes, his fingers knot in your hair, he hooks his chin over your head, so you can feel the vibration against your face as he hums, and it’s still not right. There is still a space there and, you know, both of your could strip down to nothing, press every inch of skin and it still wouldn’t fucking be enough, and you know because you have, you have, and it wasn’t. There was only one time that ever felt close, tired and candlelit and saying shit that wasn’t true, it _wasn’t_ , it _isn’t_ , and even if it was why the fuck would it matter, because he has made it fucking clear that he doesn’t—

Goddammit. God fucking dammit.

When did you get in this deep?

“If you wanted to explain it to me,” he asks, low enough that you feel it more than hear it, in the vibration of his throat on the side of your face. “— What the problem is, why this is so hard for you — you could.” _There isn’t a problem_ , you could say. You barely acknowledge the thought. You’re tired, and in too deep, and you’re not fooling yourself, and you’ve never fooled him. “I mean, probably, you just haven’t said anything because you just don’t fucking want to, but in case you needed me to ask— I want to get this. Obviously I do, it’s fucking hurting you, and because I don’t fucking understand, and I can’t _help—_ ” You can hear the break in his voice and, you think, if you were a better person, you’d feel more guilt, some sort of tight-in-your-chest. But all you feel is a kind of vague vindication, not being the only person crying, combined with a tired wishing that he just _wouldn’t_. “If you wanted to tell me. You could.”

You could deny it, you think. And you could. But he wouldn’t believe you, and you wouldn’t feel better, and you’d still be in too deep. Nothing you say for or against will change that.

You can drag your body to shore if you fucking want, but the water got in your lungs before you even noticed and sucks, Dave, but there ain’t anybody to help with that. In or out of the water, you’re still fucking drowning.

Whatever. It’s a dumb metaphor.

“It really isn’t about wanting, dude. I meant it, I just _can’t._ ” There isn’t a thing else you plan on saying, but his fingers trace gently over the line of your arm, and, dammit, you owe him this. “It’s just— it’s like there’s something there in my throat, and my chest, whenever I ever _think_ about talking about it.” He nods, just slightly, encouraging you. “Saying it is like, you know when you put your hand flat on the surface of water, and you push just a bit and there’s resistance, like— no, fuck, it’s not— it’s more than that. It’s like— do trolls have jello?”

He lets out a watery laugh. “Yeah, we have troll jello.”

“There’s enough common letters there for a real fucking portmanteau, but I gotta have a higher calibre of comedy, so I ain’t gonna do that.” His claws trail down your arm, lines of light pressure. You kind of want him to scratch you, but that kind of masochism’s gotta be either horny or self-destructive or both, and neither is really what you’re going for here. “So the jello, it’s like, I can press my hand to the surface, and I know that logically, with all the strength I got, I could push right through it, no sweat. I know it’s _possible_ , there’s nothing physically stopping me, but it ain’t just air, either. There’s a resistance. I would have to actually put energy into it, actually make that decision. 

"And, _and_ , there’s something about the smooth surface, set so nicely in somebody’s mom’s punch bowl, and if I put my hand through that jello I can’t fucking take it back, there’s a mess where you’re supposed to have the nice lo-cal dessert at this, this goddamn baby shower or whatever the fuck, but now I’ve fucked it up, and it’s clearly me who did it cause I’m the only bitch who’s got red faux-sugary mush up to his wrist, and that nice smooth surface is gone cause I _choose_ to push through it, I _took the energy_ to do that, and now everyone knows, and _I_ know, and I can’t fucking take it back or say it was a mistake or bullshit or just loneliness and dude that is a kind of commitment that I just can’t do. I can’t do it. I can’t—” You breathe, for the first time in that whole ramble. “Maybe there’s some version of me who could make that push, but I just… I’m not him.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then, gentle, hesitant, “Yet?”

“That’s pretty optimistic, dude,” you respond. You turn your head just far enough to look at him. “Honestly, man, I don’t know. It’s like, Karkat, most of the time I don’t even _want_ to be that person. The smooth surface is pretty as is, and I’m good like this, I’m _fine_ , why would I fuck that up?”

His one hand picks at the fabric of your shirt. Nervous. “There has to be something to be earned from it. Some fucking— prize at the bottom of jello bowl or—” He trails off with a groan and a kind of insectoid _tsk_ sound. “Surprise as it is, I’m not fucking fit for coming up with bullshit metaphors on the fly!”

“You’re doing alright, man.” Then, forcing down a tight coil of nerves making itself nice and cosy in your chest, “So, uh, would that be you, then? Prize in the jello bowl?”

His hand stills on your back. “I was thinking more some relief from this clear state of anxiety you are constantly fucking in about this.” You wait a moment. “...It could also be. That. Me.”

Despite all of it, you smile, pressing the expression against his shoulder. “Clearly I ain’t at my prime metaphoring either, dude, else I’d have made one with you in it.” You swallow. “Cause you are. You are a part of this. And I ain’t gonna— I’m not gonna embarrass both of us by saying how, exactly. You know.” He glances at you, then away. “I’m so fucked up about this that you’re the only reason, honestly, that I even got my hand on that surface enough to feel how difficult it’d be to push through.

“And it’s so goddamn stupid cause, like,” you continue. “Doesn’t really matter if the jello’s all intact if you and I are making out right in front of it, like, that’s still gonna cause a fucking stir at the baby shower, people are gonna figure out that I’m the kinda dude who’s wont to get his hand all gelatined, but that doesn’t make the actual act any easier, you know?”

“It’s nonsense, obviously, but yeah, I do.” He finds your hand and laces your fingers together. “I think I kind of get it.” His grasp is tight and warm. “Thank you for telling me.”

Damn, the things you could thank him for. That list’s too long to get through before he kicks you out of his block, and that ain’t even getting to the core of it. Water in lungs. Hand on gelatin surface. Shit you’ve known this whole goddamn time.

You really do, then.

Huh.

You shift, not too far, away from him. You’re still pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, your hand is still in his, but you don’t feel, anymore, like every inch of your body that isn’t flush against his is fucking frostbitten. He is here, and he is staying, and he is not leaving you. It will not be what it was, and part of you feels sick with that, but he is not leaving.

“It’s late as fuck for it,” you say. “But I do wanna apologize, dude.” He looks at you, head tilted and brow furrowed. “I think that we’re— I wish— I just, it was shitty of me. Starting this the way I did.”

He scoffs, but it’s fond, but his thumb is still rubbing gently on your hand. “You didn’t start it by yourself. You were honest with what you wanted, and I was, and we made a goddamn agreement. You can’t take sole responsibility for that. It wasn’t like you dragged me into this kicking and screaming—”

“Felt a bit like it, with the fuss you kicked up, second time I kissed you.”

“Fuck off.” He shoves your arm. It feels good, to talk about this, joke about it, like you can keep making light of it and eventually you won’t feel the chill of the loss on your skin. “You’re making fun of me, but really, Dave, this wasn’t some one-sided bad choice you can blame on yourself. It was a dumb thing to do, but it was our dumb thing. Collectively.”

“But it was good, too, sometimes. Most of the time,” you try. There’s only so much you can stand of hearing him call this a mistake. “Maybe just for me, though. I’m, I’m bad at saying it but, Karkat, don’t think I don’t see how much you did for me, especially since I didn’t do shit in return.” You see him trying to cut in, but you won’t let him. You gotta say this. “I’ve been so in my head about all this shit that I haven’t been there for you for anything and that, that _sucks_ , and I’m sorry, cause dude, you deserve better. And I’m gonna— I’m gonna try to be. Be a better friend than I was a, whatever I was.”

He smiles at you, the expression quivering, and shakes his head. “You were a great ‘whatever you were’, Dave. Obviously, you had this whole thing going on, and you had your failings, but the fact that you even— It wasn’t perfect, but I don’t resent you for a moment of it. Not at all.”

“You should,” you say, but drop it when he gives you a glance you translate to mean, that if you keep this going, it _will_ keep going. “But, yeah, fine. Then, it’s less an apology, more of a, fucking, acknowledgement of bad timing. Bad timeline, maybe.” You scratch at your opposite arm. “Something like ‘I wish I wasn’t so slow to working this thing out’, or, ‘I wish that, before stepping right the fuck into this situation, I was the version of me who could...”

“‘Fuck up the jello’?” he finishes. 

You snort, and nod. “Yeah, pretty much.” You lean your head against his shoulder. “Hey, Karkat?”

“Yeah?”

You let yourself look at him. His yellow-red eyes, his freckles, his weird teeth and soft hair and the light flush brushing his skin with pink. Dammit, of course you like looking at him. He’s the most goddamn gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen. You look, and you think it, and you don’t stop thinking it. 

Gotta keep a hold on what honesty you can.

“Dave?”

You shut your eyes. “You’re my best friend, dude.”

You crack open an eye, just enough to see, in your periphery, his smile, something wide and honest and not a bit resentful. “Oh.” 

“...And?”

He rolls his eyes and nudges you with his shoulder. “You’re my best friend, too, ‘dude’.”

You mirror his smile, albeit hidden, pressed to the fabric of his sweater. “Cool.” The slight absurdity of it hits, tight-lunged and trying hard as shit not to cry again. “Damn, that ain’t any better than ‘oh’, is it?”

He laughs. “Nope, it really fucking isn’t!”

You join him in laughing, and you shake your head, and you appreciate every inch you are pressed against him, every word of his and every moment he is willing to give you, and don’t want for more.

He’s your best friend.

That’s the thing, about you and him.

* * *

You find her in the northernmost part of the meteor, past cantown, her legs dangling over the platform that overlooks the void. You approach. Sit down next to her. The metal of the floor is cold where you press your hands to it, and it is quiet enough that you can hear one of her bitten-down fingernails scrape against the martini glass in her hand. She glances at you, but doesn’t turn her head.

You gesture towards the glass. “That cause of me?”

She shoots you a look. “Don’t… overcredit yourself.” There’s a slow to her words, a slight slur between the syllables. Not drunk. Getting there. “It’s evening, ‘nyway. Completely reasonable.”

You shrug. “Long as living without any real sense of time ain’t an excuse for unironically doing that ‘five o’clock somewhere’ bullshit, we’re good.”

She hums. “Two clocks on the meteor, Dave, which totals, without acknowledgement of night and day, four times a day that it is, as it was once called, ‘happy hour’. A sort of… ‘stopped clock is right twice daily’, but, in reverse, and four times, rather than two? You understand.”

“Didn’t know we were counting both clocks but, yeah. Gotta be one of them, now.” You feel like, you probably should know what time it is. Your MO and all that. But it’s all bullshit. Always was.

You pull one knee to your chest. “I miss you, too, Rose. I’m sorry, for not saying it before. And, you know. For the rest of it.”

She’s looking down at her glass, but in the windowpane in front of you, you can see her smile. It feels less earned than making her smile when sober, but it warms something in you, regardless. “Me too.” She lays a hand on your shoulder. “We’re going to do better.”

“Gonna try.”

“We will,” she promises. Then grins, expression dry. “The universe has seen fit to stop us, if we fall too out of line, so there isn’t another choice.”

You look out at the void. There are bubbles, bright and intimidating, but they are too few and far between for the glass to serve as anything more than a mirror of yourself and your sister. There are words trapped at that same blocked intersection in your throat, and you let them sit there for a second. You study the reflection and, in it, your shades, reflecting back the window. And back, and back, and back. Infinite.

“What…” your voice comes out low, cracked as if from disuse, as if you didn’t speak not five minutes ago. So quiet you don’t know if Rose heard you, until she meets the gaze of your reflection.

“What if I was—” Your voice is stronger, louder now, just slightly reverberating in the wide, empty room, still catching on that final fucking word. Same goddamn jello. You can’t do it. You don’t _want_ to. You’re _not there_. 

_Yet_. 

Like he said. Yet.

“If you were…” She prompts.

 _We’re going to do better_.

“What loving him would make me.”

It isn’t the great release of stored anxiety you had, somewhere deep down, hoped it’d be. It is just words. It is just words but, you find, she has to move her hand to meet where your shoulder has slumped, find that your clenched fists have gone loose and uncurled, and your breath is heavy in a way that suggests it had been stopped in your chest a moment ago. It is just words, but it is also her smiling, just slightly, in the reflection.

Just words, same as when she returns, “Then you would be.”

You snort. There is pressure behind your eyes, and a laugh is better than the alternative. “Damn, that all? No fucking psychoanalysis, or long-winded philosophical discussion on what love and sexuality even mean, all the way out here?”

“Would you rather I did?” She tilts her head to the side, eyebrow raised. “Don’t misunderstand, I certainly could.”

You shake your head. “Nah, I’m good.” You find the hand she rested on your shoulder, and place yours over it. “Thanks, Rose.”

“Of course.”

You look away from her, to the window, to the place where a light pink bubble has drifted just far enough that your reflection is lost to it. It is quiet enough that you would be able to hear the clanking of machines, deep in the meteor, if the mere thought of him wasn’t so loud. Thoughts of hand and touch and warmth and sound, blocking out any metal-on-metal with the lingering ache for he and you, as you were.

You breathe out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that's it.
> 
> this is belated, greatly, and it still isn't what I want it to be, but the platonic ideal of anything — goddamn game over sadstuck fic in 2021 included — is so often unreachable, so this is what it is. it was never intended to be a Nine Thousand word chapter, in the slightest, but it also turned out Far less angsty than I was terrified it would be, so that is good, I suppose.
> 
> i see this ending, honestly, as not unhappy, and i really hope it doesnt come across as Angst For The Point Of Angst. The main problems I pose in the beginning of the story are the pervasive loneliness, dave missing rose, dave and karkat not being friends, and dave's inability to begin to talk about his internalized homophobia, all of which are either resolved or on their way there by this point. in all honesty, i don't think davekat happened in go timeline At All, not even like this, and it, to me, would feel disingenuous and rushed to me for them to just Be Together, you know? i have a few other things i might write for this story, but in the likelihood that i never write them, you can join me in imagining that they stay friends, post game-over, into the dream bubbles, dave stops being such a bitch and learns to care for the people he cares about (rose included, he is... Not great to her in this)(also sorry for the brief rosemary angst, they will be Fine, but i couldnt have rose in this and not knowledge the way go timeline has also been Bad for her) and work through his gay Issues, and eventually, the two of them find their way back to each other. maybe that's too optimistic for anything game over timeline, but, i got more invested in this story (which was really supposed to be like 10k total at Most) than i ever intended, so im gonna think about it.
> 
> thank you so much everyone who has followed this story, left me kudos or your infinitely kind comments. i am forever so grateful, and i wish you a lovely day. <333


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